Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 217 posts.
WEI? I’m a frayed knotTwo pieces of string walk into a bar.The first piece of string asks for a drink.The bartender says, “Get lost. We don’t serve pieces of string.”The second string ties a knot in his middle and messes up his ends. Then he orders a drink. The bartender says, “Hey, you aren’t a...
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.…
Challenging projects every programmer should try
This has been a ground-breaking year for my C skills, and paradigm shifts in my technique has provoked me to reconsider my habits and coding style. It’s been my largest personal style change in years, so I’ve decided to take a snapshot of its current state and my reasoning. These changes have produced significant…
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
We’ve noticed an unusual training pattern in fine-tuning LLMs. At first we thought it’s a bug, but now we think it shows LLMs can learn effectively from a single example.
A recent article on WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) explains at a high level how the Garbage Collection (GC) proposal aims to better support GC languages in Wasm, which is very important given their popularity. In this article, we will get into the technical details of how GC languages such as Java, Kotlin…
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
Over the last several years, I’ve rewritten Rust’s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata , which exposes much of the regex crate internals as their own APIs for…
Go 1.21 expands Go's commitment to backward compatibility, so that every new Go toolchain is the best possible implementation of older toolchain semantics as well.
Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation . With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime . With the core details of my own…
SQL:2023 has been wrapped. The final text has been submitted by the working group to ISO Central Secretariat, and it’s now up to the ISO gods when it will be published. Based on past experience, it could be between a few weeks and a few months.
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests…
OCaml with Jane Street extensions is available from our public opam repo. Only a slice of the features described in this series are currently implemented.
We are reverting this change for now. More details to follow. The default compression for Git archives has recently changed. As result, archives downloaded from GitHub may have different checksums…
(update 26-Aug-2020: the MSVC team has recently added C11language support to their roadmap, hooray!)
UPDATE: This article has started an ongoing conversation with the Godot devs. They care about the issues raised, and would like to improve things. Significant improvements will almost certainly be made, although it’s still early days and it’s unclear what will change and by how much. I am encouraged by the response. I…
This post assumes some basic C skills. Linux puts you in full control. This is not always seen from everyone’s perspective, but a power user loves to be in control. I’m going to show yo…
Exploring how to use 2D graphics in various desktop operating systems, the old-school way. In this part we learn how to create an empty window under Linux, macOS and Windows.
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
Earlier this year, I lost the ability to use a keyboard and mouse for extended periods. Fortunately, this wasn't as catastrophic as it sounds! This article chronicles my experience using adaptive tools like dictation and eye-tracking as my primary mechanisms for writing code.
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
The rise of agile methods (particularly XP) makes some people wonder if there's any role left for software design. I argue that this change shifts from planned to evolutionary design.
VT220 TrueType font
In the coming months Mozilla will launch support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). We’ll announce a definite launch date in early September, ...
