Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 165 posts.
The byte order fallacy
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native b...
So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2008)
Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…
Boolean Blindness
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW
One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting…
Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
When we started what became Sencha, we made a bet on the web: a bet that modern application development didn’t need anything except the browser, a great set of frameworks and a great set of tools. With those three weapons in hand, we knew developers could build applications that would delight users.
Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
( Note : This is a copy of the original that used to live at http://www.bluetail.com/~joe/vol1/v1_oo.html )
Math For Programmers
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
Quake 3 Source Code Review
Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…
The Homely Mutt
Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you're not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.
Using unix as your IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
Python Packaging: Hate, hate, hate everywhere
A sad example of how easy it is to dismiss certain design principles because it does not seem relevant at the time.
D3: Thinking with Joins
Say you’re making a basic scatterplot using D3 , and you need to create some SVG circle elements to visualize your data. You may be surprised to discover that D3 has no primitive for creating multiple DOM elements. Wait, WAT?
Snowflake Server
a bliki entry for Snowflake Server
About HTML semantics and front-end architecture
A critical look the term 'semantic HTML' and the limitations it has created for web engineers
Where modules go to die
Another great post
Tail Call Optimisation in Common Lisp Implementations
While the Common Lisp standard does not require implementations to eliminate tail calls, some do—thereby allowing a more functional programming style. Especially in the prototyping phase, it can be useful to know where this functional style can be employed and where it's likely to cause stack overflow. Since I…
JavaScript’s internal character encoding: UCS-2 or UTF-16?
Does JavaScript use UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding? Since I couldn’t find a definitive answer to this question anywhere, I decided to look into it. The answer depends on what you’re referring to: the JavaScript engine, or JavaScript at the language level.
One sentence per line, please
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
Parallelogram
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
Pragmatic Unicode
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
Component · Decoupling Patterns
Allow a single entity to span multiple domains without coupling the domains to each other.
Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…