Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
Five years ago I wrote Classical Inheritance in JavaScript ( Chinese Italian Japanese ) . It showed that JavaScript is a class-free, prototypal language, and that it has sufficient expressive power to simulate a classical system. My programming style has evolved since then, as any good programmer's should. I have…
In this blog post, I will present one of the most interesting additions to the community 2019 version of SPARK: pointer support. One of the core…
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
This is pretty important change, as it has the chance to cause performance issues in some cases.
Postmortem on the database outage of January 31 2017 with the lessons we learned.
In most languages that support nested scopes, code can refer to or rebind (assign to) any name in the nearest enclosing scope. Currently, Python code can refer to a name in any enclosing scope, but it can only rebind names in two scopes: the local scope...
Introduction The Three Projections of Futamura are a sequence of applications of a programming technique called 'partial evaluation' or 'sp...
We’ve been doing significant testing lately with video out using various iOS devices for an upcoming project. In doing so, we waded right in the middle of a strange video out mystery. It’s time to unravel that mystery. (Chung-chung!)
Look at this incredible thing Ian Baker created. Look at it! What you’re seeing is not Photoshopped. This is an actual photo of a real world, honest to God double-clawed hammer. Such a thing exists. Isn’t that amazing? And also, perhaps, a little disturbing? That wondrous hammer
The last time the tabs-versus-spaces argument flared up in my presence, I wrote this. Gasoline for the fire? Maybe.
This essay by Carson Gross explores when to use hypermedia in web development, highlighting its advantages and trade-offs. Carson discusses scenarios where hypermedia is a good fit, such as text and image-heavy UIs, CRUD applications, and nested UIs with well-defined areas. He also addresses when hypermedia may not be…
We are going to rewrite React from scratch. Step by step. Following the architecture from the real React code but without all the…
I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s
Writing a sqlite clone from scratch in C
It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing.
DeepSeek R-1 is the most powerful open-source reasoning model that performs on par with OpenAI's o1 model. Run the 1.58-bit Dynamic GGUF version by Unsloth.
Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.
This essay explains how Git works. It assumes you understand Git well enough to use it to version control your projects.
Large language models (LLMs) are an indisputable breakthrough of the last five years, potentially profoundly changing the way that we work. As with any extraordinarily powerful tool, LLM use has both promise and peril — and that they are so general-purpose leaves real questions about how and when they should be used…
Disclaimer 2024-12-02 Since this rant is going viral again (again (again)), some disclaimers: I wrote this six years ago to “”“win”“” an ugly Twitter fight. I’m glad I anonymized the inciting tweet and hope I’m the only person still getting grief over this. The core interesting bit— why it’s mathematically valid to…
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
I have always wanted to write an emulator. I made a half-hearted attempt in college but it never made it to a demo-able state. I also didn't want to write Yet Another Emulator. It should at least bring something new to the table. When I discovered LLVM , I felt like I finally had worthwhile idea for a project.
Serverless architectures replace a managed server with a collection of third party services and FaaS
Rethinking ‘rethinking reactivity’
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is a explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful.
