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Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists
Linked lists look harmless until they start detonating your game at runtime. This is the bug pattern far too many programmers miss.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 390 posts.
242
Dangling by a Trivial Feature
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Vim Koans
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
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Haskell as fast as C: working at a high altitude for low level performance
After the last post about high performance, high level programming, Slava Pestov, of Factor fame, wondered whether it was generally true that “if you want good performance you have to write C…
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How ZFS continues to be better than Btrfs.
ZFS keeps winning over btrfs on many fronts. Here's a short list that explains exactly how.
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Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
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Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell
An article describing the experience of writing a Lisp interpreter in Haskell.
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ZeroMQ - Disconnects are Good for You
The hidden disconnects of ZeroMQ can be dangerous if you don’t write your application to work around them.
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Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0
You may have heard last week how Innokenty Mihailov’s great Enumerable::Lazy feature was accepted into the Ruby 2.0 code base. But you may not have heard about an even more significant change that was merged into Ruby 2.0 in January: a new algorithm for garbage collection called “Bitmap Marking.” The developer behind…
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Adding a new statement to Python
This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I'm taking a hands-on approach here: I'm going to add an until statement to Python.
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The Hardware Renaissance
October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that…
257
What I Hate About Git
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…
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The most dangerous code in the world
Abstract: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications. Security of SSL connections against an active network attacker depends on correctly validating public-key certificates presented when the connection is established. We demonstrate that SSL certificate validation is…
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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
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What killed the Linux desktop
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
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Living with HTTPS
( These are my notes from the first half of my talk at HOPE9 last weekend. I write notes like these not as a script, but so that I have at least some words ready in my head when I'm speaking. They are more conversational and less organised than a usual blog post, so please forgive me the rough edges. )
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The Linux Graphics Stack
This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the…
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Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
The MIT Challenge My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear ... Read more
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Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in an tiny expensive package
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
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The Little C Function From Hell
Does the standard say whether or not “char” is “unsigned char” or “signed char”? (I guess not from what you wrote above.)
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Most lives are lived by default
Jamie lives in a large city in the midwest. He's a copywriter for an advertising firm, and he's good at it. He's also good at thinking of reasons why he ought to be happy with his life. He has hea...
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Storing Passwords Securely
Why "SHA 256-bits enterprise-grade password encryption" is only slightly better than storing passwords in plain text, and better ways to do it.
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/dev/zero has infinite electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.