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The growth of command-line options, 1979-Present
My hobby : opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
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ORC – Nim's new memory managment
ORC - Algorithmic Advantages
1204
PyPy is faster than C, again: string formatting
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) ...
1205
The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
The technology industry is still young, but its history is already rich with myths and legends.
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Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
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How the OCaml type checker works (2022)
A short guide on OCaml type checker, describing the surprisingly elegant algorithm for generalization, which generalizes to first-class polymorphism, MLF and local types. Polymorphism and regions have much in common.
1210
The Illustrated GPT-2: Visualizing Transformer Language Models (2019)
Discussions: Hacker News (64 points, 3 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (219 points, 18 comments) Translations: Simplified Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Turkish This year, we saw a dazzling application of machine learning. The OpenAI GPT-2 exhibited impressive ability of writing coherent and passionate essays…
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GCC 5.1 released
Command-line optimization and target options are now streamed on a per-function basis and honored by the link-time optimizer. This change makes link-time optimization a more transparent replacement of per-file optimizations. It is now possible to build projects that require different optimization settings for…
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Queues Don't Fix Overload
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .
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Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers
Modern Object Pascal Introduction: units, classes, generics, memory management, exceptions and more.
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Visual Programming Languages – Snapshots
Interface Vision is a group working on a software development platform that can be used without coding.
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Turbo Rascal Syntax Error
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
1218
Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua
At CloudFlare, Nginx is at the core of what we do. It is part of the underlying foundation of our reverse proxy service. In addition to the built-in Nginx functionalities, we use an array of custom C modules...
1219
Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
1220
The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)
There are several reasons why one should prefer L A T E X to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L A T E X is free ). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you…
1221
Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
1222
Photoshop’s journey to the web
Over the last three years, Chrome has been working to empower web applications that want to push the boundaries of what's possible in the browser. One such web application has been Photoshop. The idea of running software as complex as Photoshop directly in the browser would have been hard to imagine just a few…
1223
The RubyGems "Security Incident"
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
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Will It Optimize? (2010)
See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…
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On Uber’s Choice of Databases
Uber provides bad advice about PostreSQL vs. MySQL
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Refining Ruby
What does the following code do? If you answered
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We have a problem with promises
No, not with promises themselves. Promises, as defined by the A+ spec , are awesome.
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Relational shell programming
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.