2791
What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
2792
Classes vs. Data Structures
Or rather, an object is a set of functions that operate on implied data elements.
2793
Towards a JavaScript Binary AST
In this blog post, I would like to introduce the JavaScript Binary AST, an ongoing project that we hope will help make webpages load faster, along with a number of other benefits. A little background Over the years, JavaScript has grown from one of the slowest scripting languages available to a high-performance…
2794
Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub
Since spring, and even before that, I have participated in a great collaborative effort on writing a book on Homotopy Type Theory. It is finally finished and ready for public consumption. You can get the book freely at http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ . Mike Shulman has written about the contents of the book , so I…
2795
300ms tap delay removed on Chrome for Android
Every click interaction in mobile browsers is hampered with a 300ms delay, but that's gone in Chrome 32 for mobile-optimized sites!
2796
The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017
Editor’s preface: When I first joined Dropbox in May 2017, we were at the tail end of our CoffeeScript to TypeScript migration. If you wanted to make changes to a CoffeeScript file, it was considered common courtesy to convert it to TypeScript while you were at it. Parts of our codebase were still using…
2797
Arguing against using protobuffers
I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions…
2798
Micro Frontends
How to split up your large, complex, frontend codebases into simple, composable, independently deliverable apps.
2799
A guide to implementing 2D platformers
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
2800
Accelerating Generative AI with PyTorch II: GPT, Fast
This post is the second part of a multi-series blog focused on how to accelerate generative AI models with pure, native PyTorch. We are excited to share a breadth of...
2801
Functorio
You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style. I’m going to show you that real engineering is functional, and …
2802
WebKit is moving away from prefixes
WebKit’s new feature policy is to implement experimental features unprefixed, behind a runtime flag.
2803
Python Language Summit: Python Without the GIL
If you peruse the archives of language-summit blogs, you’ll find that one theme comes up again and again : the dream of Python without the GIL. Continuing this venerable tradition, Sam Gross kicked off the 2022 Language Summit by giving the attendees an update on nogil , a project that took the Python community by…
2804
TypeScript 5.2's new keyword: 'Using'
TypeScript 5.2 introduces 'using', a keyword that disposes anything with a `Symbol.dispose` function upon leaving scope, making resource management easier.
2805
Three bugs in the Go MySQL driver
Check out what we learned from shipping our busiest Go service in production—we found 3 bugs in the Go MySQL driver.
2806
So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)
So You Want To Write Your Own CSV code? Fields separated by commas and rows separated by newline. Easy right? You can write the code yourself in just a few lines.
2807
The string type is broken
My previous article, “We don’t need a string type“, caused a bit of stir. Though the feedback is mixed, there is a common theme of a string being a useful feature. After doing a bit more research I can determine only one thing: most current string types are broken! Many of us believe our strings […]
2808
2809
How to make roguelike games in Rust
This tutorial is free and open source, and all code uses the MIT license - so you are free to do with it as you like. My hope is that you will enjoy the tutorial, and make great games!
2810
Zeroing buffers is insufficient
With a bit of care and a cooperative compiler, we can zero a buffer — but that's not what we need. What we need to do is zero every location where sensitive data might be stored. Remember, the whole reason we had sensitive information in memory in the first place was so that we could use it; and that usage almost…
2811
Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2812
2813
I don't want to learn your query language (2018)
This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language. There's a trillion different ORMs out there. Another trillion databases with their own query language. Another trillion SaaS products where the only way to query is to learn some random query DSL they made up.
2814
The success and failure of Ninja (2020)
Reflecting on my most successful open source project.
2815
Speeding up Ruby by rewriting C in Ruby
There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python. The repo author, @BenjDicken, created a fun visualization of each language’s performance. Here’s one of the visualizations, which shows Ruby as the third slowest…
2816
Amazon Aurora Update – PostgreSQL Compatibility
Just two years ago (it seems like yesterday), I introduced you to Amazon Aurora in my post Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS. In that post I told you how the RDS team took a fresh, unconstrained look at the relational database model and explained how they built a…
2817
We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
From the Zed Blog: Thorsten interviews co-founders Nathan, Max, Antonio about the vision and the technological choices behind Zed, how they went from Atom and Electron to Rust and GPUs with Zed.
2818
Reddit's database has only two tables
Steve Huffman talks about Reddit’s approach to data storage in a High Scalability post from 2010. I was surprised to learn that they only have two tables in their database.
2819
2820
The Mathematical Hacker
The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as: