Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 184 posts.
Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
Duke Nukem 3D Code Review
Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool , the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time : Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named " Build ". It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine…
Questions I'm asking in technical interviews
Questions I'm asking in interviews
The IDE as a value
In my last post I talked about building a game in ClojureScript using a Component-Entity-System engine and I hinted that the ideas that underly that architecture inspired how we designed Light Table . The reason why stems from the architectural goals of the project:
PHP 5.5.5 Released
PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
Web Framework Benchmarks
Round 1 of the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks Project!
Google Removes Vital Privacy Feature From Android, Claims Release Was Accidental
Yesterday, we published a blog post lauding an extremely important app privacy feature that was added in Android 4.3. That feature allows users to install apps while preventing the app from collecting sensitive data like the user's location or address book.[caption]The App Ops interface removed in...
Using Voice to Code Faster than Keyboard
2021-11-13 page moved to http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html
Gzip + poetry = awesome
Day 16: gzip + poetry = awesome
Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
WebKit for Developers
Feb 2015: A lot’s happened since I wrote this post two years ago. Chrome forked WebKit and started Blink, Opera adopted Chromium, and node-webkit became nw.js. This post describes a complexity of defining WebKit that doesn’t exist much anymore; with Chrome’s departure the WebKit world is more simple and clear.
Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations
I began with inanimate objects living in a world of forces, and I gave them desires, autonomy, and the ability to take action according to a system of
Parallelism and concurrency need different tools
In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in Microsoft Paint).
Trampolines in JavaScript
A trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk -returning functions ( continuation-passing style ). A single trampoline is sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampolining…
What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)
Is it reasonable to expect mere mortals to have mastery over every facet of the development stack? Probably not, but Facebook can ask for it. I was told at OSCON by a Facebook employee that they only hire 'Full Stack' developers. Well, what does that mean? To me, a Full Stack Developer is someone with
Getting to Docker 1.0
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"
The talk I released today is called " Media for Thinking the Unthinkable ". It's the most personal talk I've given, in that it was driven by my own motivations as opposed to someone else's.
Gap between asm.js and native gets narrower with float32 optimizations
asm.js is a simple subset of JavaScript that is very easy to optimize, suitable for use as a compiler target from languages like C and C++. Earlier this year Firefox ...
The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)
[ This is not mine. I posted it in the interest of personal archival because the oldest mention I could track down on the web appeared on a now-defunct weblog . In the meantime, Mike W. Cremer (who bills himself The Newton™ Scapegoat ☺ ) has claimed credit for coining it after a particularly frustrating DMA debugging…
A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack
A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.