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Welcome to Gas Town
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
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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How Figma's Multiplayer Technology Works
A peek into the homegrown solution we built as the first design tool with live collaborative editing.
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The Flask Mega-Tutorial
You are reading the 2024 edition of the Flask Mega-Tutorial. The complete course is also available to order in e-book and paperback formats from Amazon. Thank you for your support!If you are looking…
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Elastic TabStops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code (2017)
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
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Way to store your dotfiles: A bare Git repository (2016)
It's time to find a better way to store your dotfiles. Learn why you should start using a bare Git repository instead.
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Clip: Connecting Text and Images
We’re introducing a neural network called CLIP which efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision. CLIP can be applied to any visual classification benchmark by simply providing the names of the visual categories to be recognized, similar to the “zero-shot” capabilities of GPT-2 and GPT-3.
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Regexp-based RFC822 email address validation
Mail::RFC822::Address is a Perl module to validate email addresses according to the RFC 822 grammar. It provides the same functionality as RFC::RFC822::Address, but uses Perl regular expressions rather that the Parse::RecDescent parser. This means that the module is much faster to load as it does not need to compile…
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Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust (2020)
This post explains why Rust made sense for Discord to reimplement: how it was done, and the resulting performance improvements.
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Mocks Aren't Stubs (2007)
Explaining the difference between Mock Objects and Stubs (together with other forms of Test Double). Also the difference between classical and mockist styles of unit testing.
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A Whole New World
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.
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Software 2.0 (2017)
I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they…
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Standard Markdown Is Now Common Markdown
Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post. We’ve been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back.
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
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JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
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E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
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Programming Bottom-Up (1993)
(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…
204
QArt – Pictures in QR code with no inherent errors
QR codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode arbitrary text strings. A common use of QR codes is to encode URLs so that people can scan a QR code (for example, on an advertising poster, building roof , volleyball bikini , belt buckle , or airplane banner ) to load a web site on a cell phone instead of having to…
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The qmail security guarantee
Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…
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The Tao Of Programming
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
Disclaimer: This post is a very long collection of thoughts and problems I've had over the years, and also addresses some of the arguments I've been repeatedly told. This post expresses my opinion the has been formed over using Rust for gamedev for many thousands of hours over many years, and multiple finished games…
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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Git for Computer Scientists (2010)
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph .