Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
The original ANSI C standard, C89, introduced the concept of “undefined behavior,” which was used both to describe the effect of outright bugs like accessing memory in a freed object and also to capture the fact that existing implementations differed about handling certain aspects of the language, including use of…
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no…
Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
When I built Finda , I wanted it to be fast — specifically, to respond to all user input within 16 milliseconds.
This guide aims to introduce newcomers and experienced programmers alike to the beauty of functional programming, starting with the simplest building blocks of software. You’ll need a computer, basic proficiency in the command line, a text editor, and an internet connection. By the end of this series, you’ll have a…
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
A series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
As for dangling pointers and for ownership, this model detects all possible errors . This means that we can guarantee that a program is free of uses of invalidated pointers.
Video and transcript of Jimmy Koppel's Compose 2019 talk on defunctionalization, the best refactoring you've never heard of.
WebAssembly is a way of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser. So when people say that WebAssembly is fast, what ...
Nim is a young and exciting imperative programming language that is nearing its 1.0 release. My main motivation for using Nim is its performance / productivity ratio and the joy of programming in Nim. In this guide I’m going to show you how I start a Nim project.
In my last blog entry LLand LR Parsing Demystified, we explored LL and LR parsers from ablack-box perspective. We arrived at a model for these parsers whereb...
Why should we add generics to Go, and what might they look like?
A couple of days ago I encountered this article: How Shazam WorksThis got me interested in how a program like Shazam works… And more importantly, how hard is...
DiffEqFlux.jl – A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations...
From the Zed Blog: A detailed exploration of Zed's eventually-consistent text representation.
A static site to link people to when their code is displaying Japanese wrong.
The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.
I keep coming across people who consider parser technology a forbidding, scary field of programming. This is nonsense—a small parser can be very, very simple , and provide a wholesome exercise in recursive thinking. At the same time, it is true that you can make parsing extremely complicated. Mostly, this tends to…
This content covers my recent exploration of writing internet services, iOS apps, and macOS programs as an indie developer.
