391
Code's Worst Enemy
If you could snap your fingers and bring Perl 6 on Parrot's implementation up to the level of Rhino's, would you still choose JavaScript?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
392
Pointers Are Complicated, or What’s in a Byte?
This summer, I am again working on Rust full-time, and again I will work (amongst other things) on a “memory model” for Rust/MIR. However, before I can talk about the ideas I have for this ...
393
Scott Aaronson explains his $200k bet (8 Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong)
As of this writing, Vinay Deolalikar still hasn’t retracted his P≠NP claim, but a clear consensus has emerged that the proof, as it stands, is fatally flawed. The first reason is that weR…
394
Crit-bit Trees: the best way to store sets
A crit-bit tree can be used as a high-speed associative array. For example, an array mapping 54 to 1, 19 to 2, 99 to 3, 85 to 4, and 88 to 5 can be stored as a crit-bit tree containing 54=1, 19=2, 99=3, 85=4, and 88=5. The smallest string in the crit-bit tree larger than 85= is 85=4.
395
Version SAT
The package version selection problem is to find a set of dependencies that can be used to build a top-level package P that is complete (all dependencies satisfied) and compatible (no two incompatible packages are selected). There may be no such set, because of the diamond dependency problem: perhaps A needs B and C…
396
Making SetInterval Declarative with React Hooks
How I learned to stop worrying and love refs.
397
A guide to useEffect in React
Effects are a part of your data flow.
398
The Emacs Problem (2005)
The Emacs Problem Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Charles G. pointed out in an email discussion recently: Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java
399
Big Ball of Mud (1999)
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
400
Parallelism is not concurrency
In an earlier post I mentioned that one goal of the new introductory curriculum at Carnegie Mellon is to teach parallelism as the general case of computing, rather than an esoteric, specialized sub…
401
"I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower" (2013)
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
402
Floating-Point Determinism (2013)
Is IEEE floating-point math deterministic? Will you always get the same results from the same inputs? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Unfortunately the answer is also an unequivocal “no”. I’m a…
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React, Facebook, and the Revocable Patent License. Why It’s a Paper 🐯.
Update(9/25/17): My article about the licensing change.
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Golang data races to break memory safety
Go is becoming more and more popular as a programming language and getting more scrutiny from a security point of view. You might remember m...
407
Emacs Rocks! Episode 13: multiple-cursors
Find and mark the next part of the buffer matching the currently active region, while also keeping the current region. Get it here .
408
JSONPath - XPath for JSON
A frequently emphasized advantage of XML is the availability of plenty tools to analyse, transform and selectively extract data out of XML documents. XPath is one of these powerful tools.
409
Boolean Blindness
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
410
Clean Coder Blog
Over the last several years we’ve seen a whole range of ideas regarding the architecture of systems. These include:
411
Elastic tabstops
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
412
Things that amuse me
I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…
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AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
415
Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability
yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead … Continue…
416
Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
417
Show HN: Htop 2.0 released, now cross-platform
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
418
The Yaml document from hell
As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.
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Popcount CPU instruction
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .