Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
I love science. Not the “space is beautiful” faux-science, but the process of doing science. Hours spent calibrating equipment, cross-checking cites of cites of cites, tedious arguments about p-values and prediction intervals, all the stuff that makes science Go. And, when it does happen, the drama. I also want us to…
In 2010ish, we tried to roll out a feature ( Treasury ) using MongoDB. It was an interesting experience. I learned quite a bit in the process. I wrote about what I was thinking at the time here . But for the most part it was an abject failure and Ryan Young wound up porting the entire thing to the MySQL shards which…
If you ignore the practical issues of computers like size, weight, cost, heat, and so on, what do you really need in a programming language? Let's play around with this question.
I wrote this document after receiving large amounts of email from people who would like to write an emulator of one or another computer but do not know where to start. Any opinions and advices contained in the following text are mine alone and should not be taken for an absolute truth. The document mainly covers…
Your CPU has a 32-bit addition instruction that computes the sum of two 32-bit integers x and y, producing a 32-bit result. (The 33rd bit of the sum, the "carry bit", is usually thrown away.)
This tutorial will show you how to write assembly language programs on the x86-64 architecture.
Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply `pip install ...` but now I can'
In our company we usually have a fun quiz every sunday and this was one of them
This blog post is meant to help my friends get started in reading my other blog posts, that is, this post is a crash course on the notation ...
Recently on Twitter there was a maintainer of a Python project who had a couple of bugs filed against their project due to builds failing (this particular project doesn't provide wheels, only sdists). Eventually it came out that the project was using a pyproject.toml file because that's
One of the most annoying problems in Swift is when the compiler gives an 'Expression was too complex to be solved in a reasonable time' error. I look at why this error occurs, how to avoid it and talk about how this should be solved in a future compiler update.
Not all non-sequential primary keys are created equal, the ULID format is a fantastic substitute for the typical UUIDv4 choice.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
You mean the one where he says that he tried it for a few months and then gave up? Yes, I read it.
This is the first post in a series about JIT compilers. The plan is to take a simple input language and develop some interpreters and JITs for it, in roughtly increasing degree of complexity. It's my hope that by the end of the series readers will have a good understanding of what it takes to develop a JIT compiler…
Object Oriented Programming died several times already. This time might be the last.
When we first started porting Chrome away from just Windows, we intended to use Scons to build Chrome on all our platforms. But early on in development I discovered that Scons, despite its admirable goals of correctness and ease of use, was quite slow — it could take 40 seconds from starting Scons before it decided to…
Cyclic dependencies: Part 1
In my previous blog post on pointer provenance, I have shown that not thinking carefully about pointers can lead to a compiler that is internally inconsistent: programs that are intended to...
Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at t…
<img src="http://zwibbler.com/shared/1024.png"/> jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.
Principles of Data-Oriented Programming. Benefits and costs of Data-Oriented Programming. DOP vs OOP. DOP vs FP.
C++ has changed a lot in recent years. The last two revisions, C++11 and C++14, introduce so many new features that, in the words of Bjarne Stroustrup, “It feels like a new …
In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…
Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…
