1111
The Origins of DS_store (2006)
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
1112
On React and WordPress
Big companies like to bury unpleasant news on Fridays: A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they have decided to dig in on their patent clause addition to the React license, even after Apache had sa…
1113
1114
How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
How James Somers reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
1115
63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions
I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how …
1116
1117
Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi
Learning the lesson of vi
1118
How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
Best practices for code review when you’re the author.
1119
Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)
Let me preface this post by saying that no programmer should feel compelled to read any of these papers. I list them because I think that they provide a breadth of information that is generally useful and interesting from a computer science perspective. What you do with that information is your prerogative, including…
1120
Knuth on Huang's Sensitivity Proof: “I've got the proof down to one page” [pdf]
The Sensitivity Conjecture, which I blogged about here, says that, for every Boolean function f:{0,1}n→{0,1}, the sensitivity of f—that is, the maximum, over all 2n input strings x∈{0,1}n, of…
1121
Design Docs at Google
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of design docs for defining software designs. These are...
1122
Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with
An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.
1123
Floating Point Visually Explained
While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…
1124
4K is for programmers
My name is Brian Hauer and these are my rants about technology, politics, and anything else that irks me.
1125
1126
Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017)
In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves . The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX.
1127
Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)
It’s quite popular to bash the Windows Registry in non-technical or lightly technical terms. I’ve just spent a couple of weeks reverse engineering the binary format completely for our h…
1128
Why Python 3 Exists
This month I invited to Q&A at PuPPy [https://youtu.be/2XviXtxWKO8?list=PL4S0lvhXvdhIV2C28Ia_DeIeloBrsQBOW] (the Puget Sound Python users group) that eventually led to me explaining why Python 3 came into existence and the whole string/bytes deal. I ended up receiving a compliment on the explanation which
1129
1130
1131
Using Voice to Code Faster than Keyboard
2021-11-13 page moved to http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html
1132
Announcing .NET 2015 – .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux
It's happening. It's the reason that a lot of us came to work for Microsoft, ...
1133
Regex engine internals as a library
Over the last several years, I’ve rewritten Rust’s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata , which exposes much of the regex crate internals as their own APIs for…
1134
The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
1135
WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas
WebGPU is an upcoming Web API that gives you low-level, general-purpose access GPUs.
1136
I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for
WebGL is, all things considered, a pretty decent API. It’s not a great API, but that’s just because OpenGL is also not a great API. It gives you raw access to the GPU and is pretty low-level. For those intimidated by something so low-level, there are quite a few higher-level engines like three.js and Unity which are…
1137
How to Level Up as a Developer
How does a good developer become a great developer?
1138
1139
How HBO’s Silicon Valley Built “Not Hotdog” with TensorFlow, Keras and React Native
How we beat the state of the art to build a real-life A.I. app.
1140
I don't understand Python's Asyncio
A little confession that I have no idea how asyncio works in Python 3.