Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
A short guide on OCaml type checker, describing the surprisingly elegant algorithm for generalization, which generalizes to first-class polymorphism, MLF and local types. Polymorphism and regions have much in common.
Discussions: Hacker News (64 points, 3 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (219 points, 18 comments) Translations: Simplified Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Turkish This year, we saw a dazzling application of machine learning. The OpenAI GPT-2 exhibited impressive ability of writing coherent and passionate essays…
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
There are several reasons why one should prefer L A T E X to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L A T E X is free ). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…
Uber provides bad advice about PostreSQL vs. MySQL
What does the following code do? If you answered
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.
Collected together all for your convenience.
Summary: JWCC is a minimal extension to the widely used JSON file format with (1) optional commas after the final element of arrays and objects and (2) C/C++ style comments. These two features make it more suitable for human-editable configuration files, without adding so many features that it’s incompatible with…
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice . Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to …
Since you talk about the sanitizers and tools like Checked-C, I’ll note there’s also SaferCPlusPlus[1], which is essentially a memory-safe (and data race safe) subset of C++. The idea is that there are a finite number of C++ elements that contribute to memory unsafety, and since the advent of C++11, it is now…
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
Describing the way architectures for UIs have evolved over the years, in particular the many and often misunderstood definitions for Model-View-Controller.
There is hardly ever a good reason to invert a matrix. What do you do if you need to solve Ax = b where A is an n x n matrix? Isn't the solution A−1 b? Yes, theoretically. But that doesn't mean you need to actually find A−1. Solving the equation Ax = b is
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
