181
The Waterfall methodology was a historic accident and they knew it
The "Waterfall" methodology was a historic accident and they knew it.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 211 posts.
182
A Guide to Python's Magic Methods (2012)
A guide to all the Magic Methods in Python
183
184
185
Towards fearless SIMD
SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.
186
187
188
Java is still available at zero-cost
The Java ecosystem has always been built on a high quality $free (zero-cost) JDK available from Oracle, and previously Sun. This is as true...
189
190
Problems with CSVs (2016)
Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
191
My OTP 21 Highlights
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
192
What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)
The question on the lips of everyone in the Linux community is, "What if Linus Torvalds (affectionately known to the trade press as 'Linux Torvalds') gets hit by a bus?" Reams of virtual paper have been wasted on idle speculation about the results of what is a fairly simple experiment. We decided it was high time…
193
How I hacked hundreds of companies through their helpdesk (2017)
UPDATE: The Next Web wrote a story about my findings…
194
Lossy GIF compressor
This is an encoder (based on gifsicle ) which implements lossy LZW compression. It can reduce animgif file sizes by 30%—50% at a cost of some dithering/noise.
195
196
Type inference
Type inference is a major feature of several programming languages, most notably languages from the ML family like Haskell. In this post I want to provide a brief overview of type inference, along with a simple Python implementation for a toy ML-like language.
197
GCC 8.2 Released
This page is a "brief" summary of some of the huge number of improvements in GCC 8. You may also want to check out our Porting to GCC 8 page and the full GCC documentation .
198
Game Programming Patterns: Double Buffer (2014)
Cause a series of sequential operations to appear instantaneous or simultaneous.
199
Validating UTF-8 strings using as little as 0.7 cycles per byte
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
200
Go 2017 Survey Results
What we learned from the December 2017 Go User Survey.
201
Do or undo – there is no VACUUM
What if PostgreSQL didn’t need VACUUM at all? This seems hard to imagine. After all, PostgreSQL uses multi-version concurrency control (MVC...
202
The Art of Picking Intel Registers (2003)
I wrote this article for an online magazine called Scene Zine . Scene Zine caters to the Demo Scene, which is an digital art community dedicated to pushing the limits of computers through a mix of music, art, and computer programming. A particular category of demoscene productions, 4K intros, focus on the final…
203
The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003)
Unix tradition encourages the use of command-line switches to control programs, so that options can be specified from scripts. This is especially important for programs that function as pipes or filters. Three conventions for how to distinguish command-line options from ordinary arguments exist; the original Unix…
204
205
The Eudora Email Client Source Code
Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.
206
Reading bits in far too many ways
Resurrecting an old tradition of this blog, let’s take a simple problem, go over a way too long list of alternative solutions, and evaluate their merits. Our simple problem is this: we want t…
207
Sum Types Are Coming (2015)
Just as all mainstream languages now have lambda functions, I predict sum types are the next construct to spread outward from the typed functional programming community to the mainstream. Sum types are very useful, and after living with them in Haskell for a while, I miss them deeply when using languages without them…
208
JEP 325: Switch Expressions
Extend the switch statement so that it can be used as either a statement or an expression, and that both forms can use either a "traditional" or "simplified" scoping and control flow behavior. These changes will simplify everyday coding, and also prepare the way for the use of pattern matching (JEP 305) in switch …
209
210
Scheduling in Go: Part II
Scheduling In Go : Part II - Go Scheduler. This blogpost is the second installment in a three-part series exploring the mechanics and semantics of the Go …