Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
What this function does is to give you a lumninance-correct grayscale version of any matplotlib colormap. I've found this useful for quickly checking how my plots might appear if printed in black and white, but I think it's probably even more useful for stoking the flame of the internet's general rant against jet .
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching?
Linked lists look harmless until they start detonating your game at runtime. This is the bug pattern far too many programmers miss.
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…
We are in 2020 and the US president is about to ban TikTok, a video-sharing social network mobile app, because “it poses a risk to US…
Bob's new eBook, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is finally available on Amazon.com.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Breaking down revenue growth, the consumer subscription businesses and the importance of partnerships to the API business
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…
This morning Time.com published the final result for their annual TIME 100 Poll. Time reports that the new owner of the title ‘Worlds’s most influential person, is moot’. What T…
For a while I’ve been working on a garbage collector for Rust with Nika Layzell. I thought this would be a good time to talk of our design and …
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021126 points31 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate i…
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: malloc on Linux never fails [due to the obvious cause]. In this post, we’ll show that this indeed is the case, and explore why…
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel.
Figure from our paper: given any waveform, we can modify it slightly to produce another (similar) waveform that transcribes as any different target phrase.
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
Not sure what a “lingam” is, but if it means what I think it means, just thinking about it is making mine swell. Jackpot. Rejected app for inappropriate content.
After the last post about high performance, high level programming, Slava Pestov, of Factor fame, wondered whether it was generally true that “if you want good performance you have to write C…
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
ZFS keeps winning over btrfs on many fronts. Here's a short list that explains exactly how.
