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The Myers diff algorithm: part 1
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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The controller pattern is awful, and other OO heresy (2013)
Almost a year ago now, Jack Diederich gave a talk entitled “Stop Writing Classes“, in which he implores Python programmers to stop creating classes just for the hell of it, and specifically calls out the common pattern of a class with only a constructor/initializer and a single method—which should, of course, just be…
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The Reality of Missing Out
Tech is entering a period of inequality where the big winners lift the sector as a whole even as smaller companies suffer. The best example is Facebook, Google, and digital advertising.
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Not Explicit
Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…
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Rust: Structuring and handling errors in 2020 (2020)
After working through “the book” on the Rust programming language and getting started with the first non-trivial, real-world application I found myself faced with a question I didn’t yet feel well-equipped to handle: “How should you structure error handling in a mature rust application?”
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The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...
6517
SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads
A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.
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What FreeBSD can offer compared to other operating systems (2020)
I really wanted to make this article short … but I failed miserably. At least I tried to organize it well so one may get back to it after ‘some’ reading because its not a short le…
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Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
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Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
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Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
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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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The Little Redis Book
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
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Why Aren’t More Users More Happy With Our VMs? Part 1 (2018)
Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor…
6529
How to Write a Book in Emacs (2015)
Writing a book is a time consuming process, and if you’re going to dedicate a year, or more, of your life to it, it makes sense to pick the best tool for the job. If you’re technically inclined – and if you use Emacs – then the choice is obvious.
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Smooth Voxel Terrain, Part 2 (2012)
Last time we formulated the problem of isosurface extraction and discussed some general approaches at a high level. Today, we’re going to get very specific and look at meshing in particular.…
6531
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 …
6532
Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a ...
6533
GPT-J-6B: 6B JAX-Based Transformer
Summary: We have released GPT-J-6B, 6B JAX-based (Mesh) Transformer LM (Github).GPT-J-6B performs nearly on par with 6.7B GPT-3 (or Curie) on various zero-shot down-streaming tasks.You can try out …
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LLMs don't do formal reasoning
Important new study from Apple
6536
Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs Is a Bad Idea
I think turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea. However, recent news coverage has been framing the weaponization of pagers and radios in the Middle East as something we do not need to concern ourselves with because “we” are safe.
6537
No, QuestDB is not Faster than ClickHouse
telegra.ph/no-questdb-is-not-faster-than-clickhouse-06-152022144 points63 commentscited by 3Databases & Data details
QuestDB created a minor stir in the small but active world of analytics database benchmarking with this blog article: https://questdb.io/blog/2022/05/26/query-benchmark-questdb-versus-clickhouse-timescale. This is the money quote: “QuestDB is an order of magnitude faster than both TimescaleDB and ClickHouse in this…
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John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language (2020)
On April 8, 2020, John Horton Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On April 11, 2020, he succumbed to the disease. 1 2 3 4
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The evolution of a Scheme programmer (2020)
For a real-life implementation, see how Racket's math/number-theory does it here .