Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 506 posts.
During the annual Python core development sprint we held a meeting with Sam Gross, the author of nogil, a fork of Python 3.9 that removes the GIL. This is a non-linear summary of the meeting.
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the…
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read. Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding. Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on…
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
I’ve seen people be genuinely puzzled about why functional programming is not more popular. For example I’m currently reading “Out of the Tar Pit” where after arguing for fu…
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
List of text to diagram tools
Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major language implementations in 2021
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
In August, I set out to improve the machine learning ecosystem for Ruby and wasn’t sure where it would go. Over the next 5 months, I ended up...
How to organise and deploy dotfiles using GNU stow.
Why don't facts change our minds? This article explains the logic of false beliefs and proposes a better system for constructive conversation.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
Quick edit: While I work on a proper update, I'll note here that several posters on reddit and hackernews have pointed out ways to bring the total size of the program down to 105 bytes while still printing the full "Hello, world!" Much credit goes to Josh Triplett , who produced the 105-byte version which you can find…
The setup.py interface is an old convention from distutils, one that has bugs that cannot be fixed to bring it into line with modern Python packaging approaches. As a result, all direct...
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
I wrote this document after receiving large amounts of email from people who would like to write an emulator of one or another computer but do not know where to start. Any opinions and advices contained in the following text are mine alone and should not be taken for an absolute truth. The document mainly covers…
Object Oriented Programming died several times already. This time might be the last.
Cyclic dependencies: Part 1
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021125 points79 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
Who were the Romans? How did they understand themselves as a people and ‘Roman’ as an identity? And what were the implications of that understanding – and perhaps more importantly…
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
Sometimes I see unsourced, unclear, vaguely mystical claims about K being the fastest array language. It happens often enough that I'd like to write a long-form rebuttal to these, and a demand that the people who make these do more to justify them.
