Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
In July 1999, there was a news article stating that PC usage had doubled yet again, reaching penetration of 50% of homes. People were hailing this as yet another sign of the inevitable climb of technology, but I saw it as a warning sign that the glass was half empty, and coined the following:
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
A long-form article entitled: "Domain Logic and SQL"
DISCLAIMER : The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.
The Django ORM feels so much easier than SQLAlchemy? Maybe this article can change your perception.
Amber on Rails
Disclaimer: This software is not ready. I am using it and it is stable but I still have to make it feel great , if you have suggestions I would be glad to take them. I wrote a list of work that I will attempt in the future.
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
In 1999, Lutz Prechelt published a seminal article on the COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM (October 1999/Vol. 42, No. 10) called Comparing Java vs. C/C++ Efficiency Differences to Interpersonal Differences , henceforth Java VS C , which seems to have later (March 2000) been expanded into a full paper, An empirical comparison…
This infamous answer [https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/7488] on StackOverflow have reached meme status. The question is about finding opening tags in XHTML using a regular expression, and the answer makes it abundantly clear that this is not possible - and you will surely go mad if you try. The
Resurrecting an old tradition of this blog, let’s take a simple problem, go over a way too long list of alternative solutions, and evaluate their merits. Our simple problem is this: we want t…
tl;dr If you want to ship high quality code, you should invest in more than one of formal code review, design inspection, testing, and quality assurance. Testing catches fewer bugs per hour than human inspection of code, but it might be catching different types of bugs.
This is a followup to my previous post, prefix sum on Vulkan. Last year, I got a fancy algorithm for this problem running well on one device. This time, I will dive into the question of how to make it work well across a wide range of devices. The short answer is, it can be made to work pretty portably on Vulkan and…
I was watching engineers argue, someone was bitching about a code reviewer asking him to put more parentheses in a conditional: “As if I don’t know the precedence rules!” I don’t know them, as a matter of principle.
Table of Contents | Chapter 2 » OpenGL has been around a long time, and from reading all the accumulated layers of documentation out there on the Internet, it's not always clear what parts are h…
Here's what no one tells you when you graduate with a degree in computer science and take up a job in software engineering:
The site of Sid
Learn how to pull the pieces of a URL apart the lazy way so you can find out all the important information you wish to know about your URLs.
Though it contains forms only for function applications, variable references and anonymous functions, it is equivalent to a Turing machine.
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
It's taken me much longer than I hoped, but I finally have a second version of my patches to build static executables tested and ready to go! This set of patches vastly improves upon the first by reducing the amount of compilation needed at the cost of sacrificing a little purity. Additionally I have created a system…
wingolog: article: v8: a tale of two compilers
Just as all mainstream languages now have lambda functions, I predict sum types are the next construct to spread outward from the typed functional programming community to the mainstream. Sum types are very useful, and after living with them in Haskell for a while, I miss them deeply when using languages without them…
Decision tables are easy, simple, and powerful. You can teach them in five minutes and write one in half that time. You can look at a table and understand what it’s saying, see if it matches your problem, and check for design flaws. So it’s kinda weird that there’s basically nothing about them online. I wrote an…
