Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can be…
Living and working in the big apple comes with big rent.
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of proba- bilistic ideas…
NoSQL databases are often compared by various non-functional criteria, such as scalability, performance, and consistency. This aspect of NoSQL is well-studied both in practice and theory because sp…
Chris Haynes - web developer consultant
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
A note in advance: This is absolutely not about Docker being too "opinionated" for me, or other tools being more flexible. I believe that learning and using Docker is just plain more complicated than learning and using the tools I describe below. Docker is genuinely more complex and harder to use than the…
I talk about tree sitter, CEDET, and Combobulate -- my "paredit-style" package that's designed to work with most programming languages.
It is a lazy Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps you were idly browsing your favorite news aggregator, or visiting The Orange Website to wade through murky startup groupthink in search of interesting links.
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
The human genome project was inaugurated at the beginning of the decade as an ambitious international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence of human beings and several experimental animals. The justification for this undertaking is both scientific and medical. By understanding the genetic makeup of an organism…
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
Complex queries are hard to read. Literate SQL is about writing queries that are as easy to read as a good novel.
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.
You only need to learn a little bit of queueing theory before you start getting that ecstatic “everything is connected!” high that good math always evokes. So many damn things follow th…
If you read my recent post about Postgres you may have noted that Postgres operates primarily with fixed-size blocks of memory called “pages.” By default, Postgres pages are 8KB. This number is tuned to match operating system page sizes which are tuned to match hardware cache sizes. If you were to run Postgres on…
Update: Due to lack of interest/use, in June 2021 this site was shut down and user data (emails, names, search alerts) deleted from all systems and backups. For Extramaze LLC I'm using Racket in a commercial project -- a search engine with email alerts fo...
Like many developers I’ve been excited by the promise of Asm.js . Reading the recent news that Asm.js is now in Firefox nightly is what got my interest going. There’s also been a massive surge in interest after Mozilla and Epic announced ( mirror ) that they had ported Unreal Engine 3 to Asm.js – and that it ran…
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
AWK As A Major Systems Programming Language — Revisited
In some previous blog posts we described in details how one can generalize automatic differentiation to give automatically stability enhancements and all sorts of other niceties by incorporating graph transformations into code generation. However, one of the things which we didn’t go into too much is the limitation of…
This document comes with a companion example program, available as one file or as multiple files (zipped) .
