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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,468 posts.
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Choose Boring Technology
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…
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A note of reflection after 10 years of “A successful Git branching model”
In this post I present a Git branching strategy for developing and releasing version-based software.
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Less is exponentially more (2012)
Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012. This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go...
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Strong software tips from 2000 that are 100% valid today
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
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Worse Is Better (2001)
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
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Fire And Motion (2002)
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done. Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American E…
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
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Great Hackers (2004)
July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.'' I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste…
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The Story Of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather ( < nather@astro.as.utexas.edu > ), on May 21, 1983.
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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
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Category Theory for Programmers (2014)
Table of Contents Part One Category: The Essence of Composition Types and Functions Categories Great and Small Kleisli Categories Products and Coproducts Simple Algebraic Data Types Functors Functo…
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Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
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The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code (2000; Still relevant?)
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
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Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering
(This is a modified version of the keynote talk given by Rob Pike at the SPLASH 2012 conference in Tucson, Arizona, on October 25, 2012.)
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A Plan for Spam
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #1/3
People occasionally ask why LLVM-compiled code sometimes generates SIGTRAP signals when the optimizer is turned on. After digging in, they find that Clang generated a "ud2" instruction (assuming X86 code) - the same as is generated by __builtin_trap().
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Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
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Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
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Ripgrep – A new command line search tool
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
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SQLite as an Application File Format (2014)
An SQLite database file with a defined schema often makes an excellent application file format. Here are a dozen reasons why this is so: