1
XOR
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
Simon Tatham
Welcome to my web site. I'm Simon Tatham, a software engineer and free-software author in Cambridge, UK.
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Visit chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham → On Hacker News May 2010 – May 2026
Software Engineering 10Open Source 5Security & Privacy 4Math & Algorithms 4Systems & Performance 2Tools & Productivity 1
2
The descent to C
This article attempts to give a sort of ‘orientation tour’ for people whose previous programming background is in high (ish) level languages such as Java or Python, and who now find that they need or want to learn C.
3
Git without a forge
I’ve written quite a lot of free software in my life. Most of it was from scratch: projects I started myself. So I get to choose where to host them – or rather, I have to choose where to host them.
4
Coroutines in C (2000)
Structuring a large program is always a difficult job. One of the particular problems that often comes up is this: if you have a piece of code producing data, and another piece of code consuming it, which should be the caller and which should be the callee?
5
Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
6
Possibly all the ways to get loop-finding in graphs wrong
In my puzzle collection , there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net , Slant , and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about…
7
Two algorithms for randomly generating aperiodic tilings
[Part of a series: Penrose and hats | Spectres | finite-state transducers | more transducers | refining tilings ]
8
Philosophy of Coroutines
I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…
9
Code review antipatterns
Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to teach the author a useful trick…
10
How to Report Bugs Effectively
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