Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 146 posts.
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…
This PEP proposes to introduce a syntax to declare the encoding of a Python source file. The encoding information is then used by the Python parser to interpret the file using the given encoding. Most notably this enhances the interpretation of Unicode ...
This is a guest blog post written by Andrew Brown , with help from the PyPy developers on the pypy-dev mailing list. This tutorial's master...
One day, you’re browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they’re exactly the same, except that one block refers to “Sp…
Lately, there has been a lot of experimentation with very short programs that synthesize something that sounds like music. I now want to sha...
Two Heroku system engineers discuss their experiences using Go.
String formatting is probably something you do just about every day in Python, and never think about. It's so easy, just "%d %d" % (i, i) ...
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice . Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
How to update a web site automatically with git push, Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen
How to use Go's built-in profiler to understand and optimize your programs.
I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language…
My current thoughts on the state of Python 3 and where it’s heading.
After we announced Amber.js last week, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, to our attention. After some communication with the folks behind Amber Smalltalk, we started a discussion on Hacker News [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335916] about what we should
Have you ever been in the situation where you need to quickly understand what a piece of code in some unfamiliar language does? If the language looks a lot like what you’re comfortable with, you can usually guess what large amounts of the code does; even if you may not be completely familiar how all the language…
I happily dove into Quake World source code . Here is what I understood, hopefully it will help someone to swim. This article is in four parts : Architecture section Network section Prediction section Rendition section
Let me preface this post by saying that no programmer should feel compelled to read any of these papers. I list them because I think that they provide a breadth of information that is generally useful and interesting from a computer science perspective. What you do with that information is your prerogative, including…
How does a good developer become a great developer?
Andrew Vos's personal site
Before studying the iPhone version, it was important for me to understand how Doom engine WAS performing rendition back in 1993. After all the OpenGL port must reuse the same data from the WAD archive. Here are my notes about Doom 1993 renderer, maybe it will help someone to dive in. January 13th, 2010 : Reddit…
Konstantin Preißer made an interesting discovery , after reading my article “ PHP Hangs On Numeric Value 2.2250738585072011e-308 ”: Java — both its runtime and compiler — go into an infinite loop when converting the decimal number 2.2250738585072012e-308 to double-precision binary floating-point. This number is…
