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The Tao Of Programming
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 27 posts.
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Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
Wow, no comments? They must all be stuck on that bit about the "home row." Oh well... here's hoping some of those non-typists make it all the way through this piece.
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The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
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Top Down Operator Precedence
Vaughan Pratt presented "Top Down Operator Precedence" at the first annual Principles of Programming Languages Symposium in Boston in 1973. In the paper Pratt described a parsing technique that combines the best properties of Recursive Descent and Floyd 's Operator Precedence. It is easy to use. It feels a lot like…
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Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
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Elastic Tab Stops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
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wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors , Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward…
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the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism
In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…
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Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz's Weblog
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
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A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1
In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
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gorilla arm
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very…
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Netflix Update: Try This at Home
Ok, so here's where I tell all about how I (now we) got to be tied for third place on the netflix prize . And I don't mean a sordid tale of computing in the jungle, but rather the actual math and methods. So yes, after reading this post, you too should be able to rank in the top ten or so.
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Rails and Merb Merge
Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation. Before talking tech, and even going into the details of the announcement, I want
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What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz
Some folks have asked me what I know about Phil Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Phil Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I…
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Processing ported to JavaScript
As a sort-of reverse birthday present I’ve decided to release one of my largest projects, in recent memory. This is the project that I’ve been alluding to for quite some time now :
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Follow Hacker News from the Console
Here is something neat that I hacked together – a `top' like Python program called Hacker Top that allows you to follow Hacker News from a UNIX terminal! Hacker News has become the 2nd source for news after programming.reddit for me. I have a couple of ideas for a startup myself and the tips I get from Hacker News...
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John Resig on TraceMonkey
I’ve been waiting to blog about this for a long time now. A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a techniques, called trace trees (PDF), which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey.
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The Failure of Lisp? A Reply To Brandon Werner
Welcome to Ocean of Games where you can download free Ocean games, reviews and charts of best and top rated games by official oceanofgames 2025 get full, rip or compressed games setup with videos guides
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Wanna learn JavaScript? Here are 15 video lectures (with key ideas written out)
I decided I wanted to get better at JavaScript. I've been programming in it for a while but I never really developed any good skills in it. I was just mostly copy pasting examples together and adjusting code to get it working. I recently found a bunch of really good programming video lectures on JavaScript and…