Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single…
SectorC ( github ) is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that fits within the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine. It supports a subset of C that is large enough to write real and interesting programs. It is quite likely the smallest C compiler ever written.
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create...
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on…
Reasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path (“running the program in your head”) while knowing what the goal of the code is.
GitHub Actions has a package manager that ignores decades of supply chain security best practices: no lockfile, no integrity verification, no transitive pinning
This post is a long form essay version of a talk about PyTorch internals, that I gave at the PyTorch NYC meetup on May 14, 2019.
Are you a Python programmer and interested in Rust? This article goes over the basics of making the jump.
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to…
I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…
I have kept myself busy with the Game Engine Black Books and I have plenty of news. Most importantly, they have been revised. The DOOM book is now in version 1.1 while the WOLF3D book is entering v2.1. And there is more.
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website? Fuck around and find out!
Last week, I released A Snake’s Tale on iOS , Android , Windows, Mac, and Linux .
Git is the source code version control system that is rapidly becoming the standard for open source projects. It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things wit…
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK)…
Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.
Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008.
A collection of specific ways to improve your use of Rust
Update: I gave a talk on this topic at P99 CONF 2023 and at PyCon IL 2024 (Hebrew). A while ago at $work, we had a performance issue with one of our core Python …
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
A guide to modern Python tooling with a focus on simplicity and minimalism.
I wrote Gitlet to show how Git works under the covers. I wrote it to be readable. I commented the code heavily.
