Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
we forked SQLite with the libSQL project. What would it be like if we just rewrote it?
We’ve created an improved version of OpenAI Codex, our AI system that translates natural language to code, and we are releasing it through our API in private beta starting today.
Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version of the information manager from hell (that's actually the tagline for Git, look it up ), he had a very specific use case in mind: his own. He wanted to replace BitKeeper, the distributed version control system that was…
This is a follow-up to Allan Odgaard's excellent article macOS 10.15: Slow by Design . I want to talk specifically about the first section "Spawning a new Process", because there has been widespread misunderstanding of this. Odgaard provides a simple test to show that the first run of an executable is delayed while…
Leaving node.js land
People are excited about running WebAssembly outside the browser. People are also excited about running WebAssembly from languages like Python, Ruby, and Rust. Lin Clark's Code Cartoons are back, illustrating ...
An introduction to the basic operations needed to get started with Go modules.
I have three big announcements to make today. The first is the official announcement of our next project. We’ve been quietly talking about it over the past few months, but today we want to tell you a bit more about it and finally reveal its name:
For my first post on dev.to I thought I'd write about a nice, safe topic that's free of controversy:...
Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust. For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/ Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced.
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
In 2001, Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote a letter to the Budget Council of The University of Texas. A PDF is available here , I’ve typed it up so that everyone can read it. Sadly, the curriculum was changed to Java . Relatedly, the algorithmic language Scheme was replaced by Python in MIT’s The Structure and Interpretation…
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.
Go 1.5 is the first step toward a new low-latency future for the Go garbage collector.
JDK 16 is out, and as usual, each new release comes with a bunch of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. ZGC received 46 enhancements and 25 bug fixes. Here I’ll cover a few of the more interesting enhancements.
Integer overflow detection/handling in Rust is sometimes misunderstood.
We describe an approach to tracing the “step-by-step” computation involved when a model responds to a single prompt.
Accelerating TensorFlow 2 performance on Mac
It turns out my hopes were answered. First, Prechelt published another article that covers Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx. Also, Ron Garret (nee Erann Gat) did a follow-up study in which he asked programmers to write Prechelt's test program in Lisp. His results show that the resulting Lisp programs ran faster on average…
“ Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. ” – Edsger Dijkstra
It’s terribly punny/dorky of me, but reading your post it just occurred to me one could start a blog called “Race Condition” about being a person of color and being a computer scientist.
[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →
