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Why WebAssembly Is Faster Than Asm.js
Performance is tricky to measure, and has many aspects. Also, in a new technology there are always going to be not-yet-optimized cases. So not every single benchmark will be fast ...
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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File Descriptor Limits
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Unifying the Technical Interview
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
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Fast enough VMs in fast enough time
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
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Easy Scalable Text Rendering on the GPU
This post describes the text rendering algorithm I used on thetamath.com, a GPU-powered 2D equation renderer I wrote for fun last December…
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Citus 10 brings columnar compression to Postgres
Deep dive into Citus columnar storage for Postgres. Includes a quickstart, as well as performance measurements for data loading, compression ratios, and query response times. Also covers how columnar relates to Citus, integration with Postgres range partitioning, limitations, & ways to get started.
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Use Haskell for shell scripting
turtle 1.0 announcement post
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Making JavaScript run fast on WebAssembly
JavaScript in the browser runs many times faster than it did two decades ago. And that happened because the browser vendors spent that time working on intensive performance optimizations.
1542
Why aren't you using git-flow?
git-flow is a library of git subcommands that helps automate your branching and release workflow workflow, using Vincent Driessen's successful branching model.
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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…
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The State of Agile Software in 2018
Agile Software Development may be mainstream, but much of what's done is faux-agile, and we need to push back.
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Experiments in Constraint-Based Graphic Design
Basalt is system for graphic design that allows a designer to think in terms of relationships between objects, and it makes it easy to build and reuse abstractions.
1547
Speed Without Wizardry
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
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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…
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What to Know Before Debating Type Systems (2008)
I was asked by someone to put this old piece of writing of mine somewhere more permanent, so here it is. A few comments off the top: This isn’t new. I wrote it years ago. Yes, I’m a b…
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Clojure’s Approach to Identity and State (2008)
Many people come to Clojure from an imperative language and find themselves out of their element when faced with Clojure’s approach to doing things, while others are coming from a more functional background and assume that once they leave Clojure’s functional subset, they will be faced with the same story re: state as…
1553
XSLT is a failure wrapped in pain
“ The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.” – Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
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Stop Writing Dead Programs
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
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Removing garbage collection from the Rust language (2013)
I've been floating ways to simplify the memory management story in Rust around the core team lately. Memory management is a contentious topic, since we've worked hard to get to the current state of things, and with the push toward stability lately, there is a (quite reasonable!) resistance to any changes at this…
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The Art of Unix Programming
My fourth book.
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Why Htmx Does Not Have a Build Step
In this essay, Alexander Petros explores the reasons why the htmx JavaScript library does not include a build step, detailing the benefits of its simple, dependency-free structure. He highlights the longevity of plain JavaScript, the improved debugging experience, enforced code clarity, and the tradeoffs of avoiding…
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Separate Your Billing from Entitlements
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…
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Racket-On-Chez Status: January 2019
posted by Matthew Flatt For background information about Racket on Chez Scheme (a.k.a. Racket CS), see the original announcement, last January's report, and the report at Scheme Workshop 2018. Racket on Chez Scheme is done in a useful sense. All...