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How fast is AMP really?
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 378 posts.
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Towards fearless SIMD
SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.
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Solving My Email Problem
Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here’s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my TODO list. And I don’t want that.
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Dark Patterns, the Ratchet
A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest.
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How Does an Intel Processor Boot?
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
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The iPhone Franchise
The iPhone is a franchise, a product that will make money in well-defined ways; Apple understands that and is exploiting it more than ever before with the iPhones XS and XR.
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Java is still available at zero-cost
The Java ecosystem has always been built on a high quality $free (zero-cost) JDK available from Oracle, and previously Sun. This is as true...
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Problems with CSVs (2016)
Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
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What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)
The question on the lips of everyone in the Linux community is, "What if Linus Torvalds (affectionately known to the trade press as 'Linux Torvalds') gets hit by a bus?" Reams of virtual paper have been wasted on idle speculation about the results of what is a fairly simple experiment. We decided it was high time…
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Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the Engli…
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Comparing City Street Orientations
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
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Letting neural networks be weird
Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to…
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A Day in the Life of Americans
I wanted to see how daily patterns emerge at the individual level and how a person’s entire day plays out. So I simulated 1,000 of them.
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Lossy GIF compressor
This is an encoder (based on gifsicle ) which implements lossy LZW compression. It can reduce animgif file sizes by 30%—50% at a cost of some dithering/noise.
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How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
Tokyo has rightly been getting some plaudits for housebuilding of late, and this post brings together some stats that illustrate just how impressive its record is. First, some definitions and conte…
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Type inference
Type inference is a major feature of several programming languages, most notably languages from the ML family like Haskell. In this post I want to provide a brief overview of type inference, along with a simple Python implementation for a toy ML-like language.
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Oculus GoBlack – How to Make Your Oculus Go Better
Oculus Go, like all products, is the result of a series of compromises around cost, schedule, quality, and competence. It is clearly the best standalone VR platform on the market, but anyone …
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The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
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Game Programming Patterns: Double Buffer (2014)
Cause a series of sequential operations to appear instantaneous or simultaneous.
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Validating UTF-8 strings using as little as 0.7 cycles per byte
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
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Do or undo – there is no VACUUM
What if PostgreSQL didn’t need VACUUM at all? This seems hard to imagine. After all, PostgreSQL uses multi-version concurrency control (MVC...