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How to read C type declarations (2003)
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.
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How Does OpenAI Survive?
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
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Should AI Be Open?
I. H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons:They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the l…
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An Introduction to Lock-Free Programming (2012)
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
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Down with Determinants (1995)
This paper was published in the American Mathematical Monthly 102 (1995), 139-154.
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Effective Concurrency with Algebraic Effects in Multicore OCaml
Algebraic effects and handlers provide a modular abstraction for expressing effectful computation, allowing the programmer to separate the expression of an effectful computation from its implementation. In this post, I will present an extension to OCaml for programming with linear algebraic effects, and demonstrate…
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The Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017)
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
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What is the small web? (2020)
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
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Darts, Dice, and Coins: A beautiful article on a beautiful algorithm
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice . Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
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Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
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Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study
Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to …
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Undefined Behavior in 2017
Since you talk about the sanitizers and tools like Checked-C, I’ll note there’s also SaferCPlusPlus[1], which is essentially a memory-safe (and data race safe) subset of C++. The idea is that there are a finite number of C++ elements that contribute to memory unsafety, and since the advent of C++11, it is now…
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The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
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Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.
2597
The Door Problem (2014)
“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”
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Holography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms (1999)
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
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Epitaph for an Entrepreneur - Balancing Family and Work
For the next few months I’ll be posting a series of posts on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make my dent in the universe and trying …
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Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
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Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces
Mac, iPhone & iPad interface design consulting, writing and speaking featuring tutorials, interviews, techniques and thoughts on crafting & building beautiful software. By Mike Rundle.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
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GUI Architectures (2006)
Describing the way architectures for UIs have evolved over the years, in particular the many and often misunderstood definitions for Model-View-Controller.
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Reflections
The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective...
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Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for the non-tech people in my life on what AI is starting to change — why it's moving faster than you think, and what to do about it.
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Don’t invert that matrix (2010)
There is hardly ever a good reason to invert a matrix. What do you do if you need to solve Ax = b where A is an n x n matrix? Isn't the solution A−1 b? Yes, theoretically. But that doesn't mean you need to actually find A−1. Solving the equation Ax = b is