Mostly thoughts about programming. Maybe other stuff too.
Visit nickdrozd.github.io → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2019 – Sep 2021
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“signed char lotte” is a computer program written by Brian Westley and the winner of the “Best Layout” award in the 1990 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The cleverness of the text is staggering. Superficially it reads as an epistolary exchange between two (possibly former) lovers, Charlotte and Charlie. At…
Donald Knuth is a computer scientist who is so committed to the correctness of his books that he offers one US hexadecimal dollar ($2.56, 0x$1.00) for any “bug” found in his books, where a bug is anything that is “technically, historically, typographically, or politically incorrect”. I wanted to get a Knuth check for…
The Spaghetti Code Conjecture says that Busy Beaver programs ought to be, in some sense, as complicated as possible. Scott Aaronson puts it this way:
I love linters. A linter is a program that looks for problems in code without running it. There is something gratifying about running a linter on a codebase and seeing a big list of warnings and errors. Sometimes it can even be fun to fix them!