Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,238 posts.
This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution. Please see the companion informational PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
Long time Pythoneer Tim Peters succinctly channels the BDFL’s guiding principles for Python’s design into 20 aphorisms, only 19 of which have been written down.
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
(This is a modified version of the keynote talk given by Rob Pike at the SPLASH 2012 conference in Tucson, Arizona, on October 25, 2012.)
People occasionally ask why LLVM-compiled code sometimes generates SIGTRAP signals when the optimizer is turned on. After digging in, they find that Clang generated a "ud2" instruction (assuming X86 code) - the same as is generated by __builtin_trap().
An SQLite database file with a defined schema often makes an excellent application file format. Here are a dozen reasons why this is so:
Build your software factory on Warp: factories as code, any model or harness, with evals, benchmarks, and self-improvement built in.
PEP 3107 introduced syntax for function annotations, but the semantics were deliberately left undefined. There has now been enough 3rd party usage for static type analysis that the community would benefit from a standard vocabulary and baseline tools w...
Because our product is written in C++, which can easily be compiled into WebAssembly, Figma is a perfect demonstration of this new format’s power.
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
We are the home of quality software such as dwm , dmenu , st and plenty of other tools , with a focus on simplicity, clarity and frugality. Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector. Unfortunately, the tendency for…
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
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Clojure is a dynamic language. Among other things this means that type annotations are not required for code to run. While Clojure has some support for type hints, they are not an enforcement mechanism, nor comprehensive, and are limited to communicating information to the compiler to aid in efficient code generation…
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
This PEP outlines the behavior of Python scripts when the python command is invoked. Depending on a distribution or system configuration, python may or may not be installed. If python is installed its target interpreter may refer to python2 or python3. ...
This is a proposal for creating a way to assign to variables within an expression using the notation NAME := expr.
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
Not every code injection bug is a security hole.
A technical talk about the structure and details of the new, low-latency Go garbage collector.
The scrypt key derivation function and encryption utility
Go is an open-source programming language that focuses on simplicity, reliability, and efficiency, specifically designed to make it easy to build software at scale. Although it borrows ideas from existing languages, it has unusual properties that make effective Go programs different in character from programs written…
