Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 327 posts.
I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World ("Out Of This World" in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's "binary to C++" initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable. I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting…
It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block’s Annual Stree…
Imaginary numbers always confused me. Like understanding e, most explanations fell into one of two categories: Gee, what a great way to encourage math in…
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…
April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]
If you're fastidious about keeping your windows tidy, Stay is for you. Stay ensures that your windows are where you want them, even as you connect and disconnect displays.
On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes do…
Back in 1998, I wrote: Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. In 2004, Cory Doctorow called this Schneier’s law: …what I think of as Schneier’s Law: “any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to…
You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity.
October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions…
Dylan? C# 3? Perl 6? Does it have deterministic destructors, even as blocks like Python 2.5? Generics? A powerful macro system? Even as described it sounds like magic, but not a moment too soon.
I'm no graphics expert, but appreciate why square roots are useful. The Pythagorean theorem computes distance between points, and dividing by distance helps…
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
accessors (2) advertisement (11) advice (4) apple (7) apress arc (6) arduino assembly (11) assert (2) atomic (3) audio (4) autorelease (3) blocks (14) bolo (3) book (4) books (2) braaaiiiinnnssss (2) bridging bug (3) c (19) c++ (4) c99 casestudy chemicalburn (4) clang (5) classic (2) cocoa (42) code (4) codeinjection…
Update 2014.12.17: Now that SSL is encouraged for everyone and doesn’t have performance concerns , this technique is now an anti-pattern . If the asset you need is available on SSL, then always use the https:// asset.
Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason...
Explaining the Dependency Injection pattern, by contrasting it with Service Locator. The choice between them is less important than the principle of separating configuration from use.
The sustainability pages are essentially done, although I plan to improve them and respond to inadequacies people find. Having done my best to show that material progress is sustainable, I can justifiably turn my attention to the future and present ideas about what progress people will want and what can be achieved…
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.
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…
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…
The home of pythonistas
Hey kids, did you know that JavaScript doesn't have integers? That's right! All JavaScript numbers (either primitive numbers, or the Number object, and don't even get me started on how stupid it is that there is even a distinction between the two) are actually double floats! Now, in any Lisp-derived language, you…
Milton Friedman? William Aberhart? Walter Augustus Wyckoff? Unemployed Worker? Businessman in China? UK Minister of Agriculture?
