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C++ Has Become More Pythonic (2014)
C++ has changed a lot in recent years. The last two revisions, C++11 and C++14, introduce so many new features that, in the words of Bjarne Stroustrup, “It feels like a new …
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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Render Multimedia in Pure C
In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…
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Effective harnesses for long-running agents
How an initializer agent and an incremental coding agent help the Claude Agent SDK make steady progress across many context windows.
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Fast high-level programming languages
Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…
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A tail calling interpreter for Python (already landed in CPython)
It’s been nearly four years since I published Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: HowI Learned To Love Tail Calls inC.In that article, I presented a technique I co-d...
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Don't fall in love with your technology
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Insecurities in the Linux /dev/random
New paper: “Security Analysis of Pseudo-Random Number Generators with Input: /dev/random is not Robust, by Yevgeniy Dodis, David Pointcheval, Sylvain Ruhault, Damien Vergnaud, and Daniel Wichs. Abstract: A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is…
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Running GUI apps with Docker
I've been doing all of my real (paid) work on VMs / containers for a while now but when it comes to writing Java code...
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A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch
This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the…
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Supabase Wrappers: A framework for building Postgres foreign data wrappers
A framework for building Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers which connects to Stripe, Firebase, Clickhouse, and more.
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Towards Crystal 1.0
Currently the main goal of the Crystal core team is to reach 1.0 in the near future. Since achieving that goal involves a number of non-obvious tradeoffs, we want to use this post to shed some light on those inherent tensions and how they drive our work and priorities for the next few releases.
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$20K Bounty Offered for Optimizing Rust Code in Rav1d AV1 Decoder
In March of 2023 we announced that we were starting work on a safer high performance AV1 decoder called rav1d, written in Rust. We partnered with Immunant to do the engineering work. By September of 2024 rav1d was basically complete and we learned a lot during the process. Today rav1d works well—it passes all the same…
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I Won't Use Next.js
I've written tens of thousands of lines of code with Remix and I want to tell you why I love using this framework.
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Requiem for GitHub
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Image Dithering: Eleven Algorithms and Source Code (2012)
Dithering is still a surprisingly applicable technique, not just for practical reasons (such as preparing a full-color image for output on a non-color printer), but for artistic reasons as well. Dithering also has applications in web design, where it is a useful technique for reducing images with high color counts to…
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Context Engineering for AI Agents: Lessons
This post shares the local optima Manus arrived at through our own "SGD". If you're building your own AI agent, we hope these principles help you converge faster.
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Wild claims about K performance
Sometimes I see unsourced, unclear, vaguely mystical claims about K being the fastest array language. It happens often enough that I'd like to write a long-form rebuttal to these, and a demand that the people who make these do more to justify them.
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Real-Time Garbage Collection Is Real
Real-Time Garbage Collection (RTGC) tests the limits of what we typically think is possible in production software. You might hear “Real-Time” and “Garbage Collection” together and think “If you truly need real-time guarantees, why would you use a garbage collected language?” or “How is real-time Garbage Collection…
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Combobulate: Structured Movement and Editing with Tree-Sitter
Combobulate is a package that adds advanced structured editing and movement to many programming modes in Emacs. Here's how it works, and how it can enrich your editing experience in Emacs.
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Moving away from HDF5
Cyrille Rossant,
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Algorithmic fitting of Japanese candy
Introduction to bin packing through a simple example of fitting boxes of candy inside a parcel.
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Threads (in Ruby): Enough Already
For a while now, the Ruby community has become enamored in the latest new hotness, evented programming and Node.js. It's gone so far that I've heard a number of prominent Rubyists saying that JavaScript and Node.js are the only sane way to handle a number of
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Syntax across languages
Looking for operator or function names? Well have a look at the following and remember using existing one may ease the transition :)
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Traveling Salesman: the most misunderstood problem
Whenever people start talking about NP-Complete problems, or even NP problems, one of the first examples they reach for is the classic Traveling Salesperson Problem. TSP makes sense because it int...
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Checked exceptions: Java’s biggest mistake (2014)
Checked exceptions have always been a controversial feature of the Java language.