Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
“If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.” — Steve Yegge There you have it. Think about it. It doesn’t really matter …
Update: This post got a sequel, Breaking our latin-1 assumptions. I’ve seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in posts discussing it. …
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
Almost exactly a year ago, Google made one of the most remarkable press releases in the Web 2.0 era. Of course, by "press release", I actually mean keynote at their own conference, and by "remarkable" I mean potentially-transformative and groundbreaking. I am referring of course to the announcement of Google Wave , a…
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
These are by no means all the reasons why your JavaScript might fail to run even when you expected it to. Andy Bell has a great list over at piccalil.li of a handful of very realistic reasons JavaScript won’t be available . Check ’em out, and be prepared.
Originally published on CodeGangsta on May 19, 2014. Restored here to preserve the legacy Martini/Golang archive. It’s never easy to take honest criticism, especially when the target of the criticism…
GCC now uses C++ as its implementation language. This means that to build GCC from sources, you will need a C++ compiler that understands C++ 2003. For more details on the rationale and specific changes, please refer to the C++ conversion page.
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
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?
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp…
One of the least well known, and therefore least used, features of many terminal emulators is bracketed paste mode . When you are in bracketed paste mode and you paste into your terminal the content will be wrapped by the sequences \e[200~ and \e[201~ .
Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments in, and are comfortable with the performance, security and stability of, industry-standard platforms like the JVM. While Java developers may envy the succinctness, flexibility and productivity of dynamic languages, they have concerns about running on…
Is a million lines of code a lot? How many lines of code are there in Windows? Facebook? iPhone apps? Let our data-visualization program your brain.
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
a bliki entry for Snowflake Server
A critical look the term 'semantic HTML' and the limitations it has created for web engineers
Another enjoyable read. Thanks! One thing, though -- it's about time to update your understandings of Python's object system. Python's culture doesn't insist that traditional (Smalltalkish) OO is the One True Way to re-use code, but that doesn't mean that everything in Python is not an object (because they are, since…
A “ quine ” (or “ selfrep ”) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a…
