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Smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
2372
Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
2373
Money, money, money (and investing) (2015)
A comprehensive introduction to investing in stocks, mutual funds (managed and index), short-selling, and stock options.
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Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
In 2001, Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote a letter to the Budget Council of The University of Texas. A PDF is available here , I’ve typed it up so that everyone can read it. Sadly, the curriculum was changed to Java . Relatedly, the algorithmic language Scheme was replaced by Python in MIT’s The Structure and Interpretation…
2375
Which GPUs to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
2376
The Homely Mutt
Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you're not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.
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Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030
The scientific consensus is clear. The world confronts an urgent carbon problem. The carbon in our atmosphere has created a blanket of gas that traps heat and is changing the world’s climate. Already, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1 degree centigrade. If we don’t curb emissions, and temperatures continue to…
2378
Agile: 5 years later and you're still doing it wrong
Which values of the Agile Manifesto do you find foolish? If you're going to tar and feather it(Agile), maybe you should start at the source.
2379
Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity
Go 1.5 is the first step toward a new low-latency future for the Go garbage collector.
2380
The Gentle Seduction (1989)
He worked with computers; she worked with trees, and the flowers that took hold on the sides of the Mountain.
2381
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'."
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X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
2385
Privacy-Preserving Ad Click Attribution for the Web
A typical website is made of numerous components coming from a wide variety of sources.
2386
The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox
The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.
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Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990)
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
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ZGC – What's new in JDK 16
JDK 16 is out, and as usual, each new release comes with a bunch of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. ZGC received 46 enhancements and 25 bug fixes. Here I’ll cover a few of the more interesting enhancements.
2391
Noyb aims to end “cookie banner terror” and issues more than 500 GDPR complaints
Today, noyb.eu sent over 500 draft complaints to companies who use unlawful cookie banners - making it the largest wave of complaints since the GDPR came into force.
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Windows Subsystem for Linux Architectural Overview
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories .
2394
A Timeline of the OpenAI Board
Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI.
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Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
Case studies from threat actors disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas of harm, from cyber operations to biological misuse.
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Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
2398
Myths about Integer Overflow in Rust
Integer overflow detection/handling in Rust is sometimes misunderstood.
2399
Bypassing the Linux kernel for high-performance packet filtering
In two previous posts we've discussed how to receive 1M UDP packets per second and how to reduce the round trip time. We did the experiments on Linux and the performance was very good considering it's a general purpose operating system.
2400
Call me maybe: etcd and Consul
In the previous post, we discovered the potential for data loss in RabbitMQ clusters . In this oft-requested installation of the Jepsen series, we’ll look at etcd : a new contender in the CP coordination service arena. We’ll also discuss Consul ’s findings with Jepsen.