871
I Wrote My Fastest Hashtable
I had to get there eventually. I had a blog post called “I Wrote a Fast Hashtable” and another blog post called “I Wrote a Faster Hashtable.” Now I finally wrote the fastest…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
872
Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don…
873
If not React, then what?
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
874
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The worst API ever made (2014)
A call-by-call look at context switch logging with the Event Tracing for Windows API.
876
What's Functional Programming All About?
There are many descriptions floating around the internet, trying to explain functional programming in simple terms. Unfortunately, most discuss details only loosely related to functional programming, while others focus on topics that are completely irrelevant. So of course, I had to write my own!
877
Main is usually a function – when is it not?
It began when my coworker, despite already knowing how to program, was forced to take the intro level Computer Science course at my university. We joked with...
878
A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles
In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various…
879
880
Teaching GPT-3 to Identify Nonsense
In Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test, Kevin Lacker found that GPT-3 does well answering simple factual questions like “Who was president of the United States in 1955?”, but also happily answered absurd qu…
881
Clojure Design Patterns
Disclaimer: Most patterns are easy to implement because we use dynamic typing, functional programming and, of course, Clojure. Some of them look wrong and ugly. It’s okay. All characters are fake, coincidences are accidental.
882
Creating Shazam in Java
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883
Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
Supply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem. In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn’t used back then. (The field of computer science was still young and small enough that…
884
Rust's Type System Is Turing-Complete: Type-Level Programming in Rust
(N.B. The word “fuck” appears multiple times in this post. I recommend that the reader temporarily not consider “fuck” as profanity, as it isn’t used that way here.)
885
500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format
Haiku uses a custom vector image format to store icons. This is surprising both because most OSes consider bitmaps to be totally sufficient to represent icons and because there are plenty of vector graphics formats out this (e.g. SVG). The goal of the Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is to make vector icon files as…
886
C and C++ prioritize performance over correctness
The original ANSI C standard, C89, introduced the concept of “undefined behavior,” which was used both to describe the effect of outright bugs like accessing memory in a freed object and also to capture the fact that existing implementations differed about handling certain aspects of the language, including use of…
887
What's the best programming language for coding agents?
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no…
888
Names are not type safety
Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…
889
8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
890
Microsoft BASIC for 6502 – Original Source Code (1978)
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
891
Clojure from the ground up
This guide aims to introduce newcomers and experienced programmers alike to the beauty of functional programming, starting with the simplest building blocks of software. You’ll need a computer, basic proficiency in the command line, a text editor, and an internet connection. By the end of this series, you’ll have a…
892
Bloom Filters by Example
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
893
Wordle-solving state of the art: all optimality results so far
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
894
Writing great documentation
A series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.
895
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Unix as IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
897
Defunctionalize the Continuation
Video and transcript of Jimmy Koppel's Compose 2019 talk on defunctionalization, the best refactoring you've never heard of.
898
LL and LR in Context: Why Parsing Tools Are Hard (2013)
In my last blog entry LLand LR Parsing Demystified, we explored LL and LR parsers from ablack-box perspective. We arrived at a model for these parsers whereb...
899
Creating Shazam in Java (2010)
A couple of days ago I encountered this article: How Shazam WorksThis got me interested in how a program like Shazam works… And more importantly, how hard is...
900
Your code displays Japanese wrong
A static site to link people to when their code is displaying Japanese wrong.