The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
While on vacation, I’ve been working on an alternate type inference scheme for rustc. (Actually, I got it 99% working on the plane, and have been slowly poking at it ever since.) This scheme simplifies the code of the type inferencer dramatically and (I think) helps to meet our intutions (as I will explain). It is…
A collection of the most unfortunate but occasionally subtle issues I’ve seen in code written by students new to writing Python.
Recently there have been heated complaints that the culture of programming unfairly excludes some groups. They want to join the programming elite and get a spot at the startup trough. More power to…
You’re part of a preternaturally enlightened dev team, and have set aside an entire day for nothing but code review. However, after the first 2 hours, you realise that you have forgotten your glasses and have just been staring at colourful blurs all morning. What do you do?
Having just returned from the annual Oregon Programming Languages Summer School, at which I teach every year, I am once again very impressed with the impressive growth in the technical sophisticati…
An important question in code structure is whether to make classes work together through composition or inheritance. The "has a" relationshi...
I got started hacking on my own roguelike after spending several years avidly playing Angband . Like most projects, I had a few itches I wanted to scratch and it kind of took on a life of its own. One thing that annoyed me about Angband was how monsters dropped loot when they died.
A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote an implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm in Clojure. The core algorithm came to twenty-five lines. I banged out the code as...
Leaving node.js land
We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising…
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
This year was the first time I've attended the Google I/O conference, and it was a fascinating experience. As someone who is primarily an iOS developer and h...
…that I wish I had known when I started grad school
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for
Lately a Reddit post caught my attention which is about a raycaster demo, animated, with mouse control and texture mapping, in only 128 byt...
At Oktavilla we regularly start new projects. Over the years we have therefore come up with a few best practices to ensure that it is easy to take part in ou...
Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better…
Warning: another technical post.I wrote this cover letter many years ago, when I wanted to get accepted to the Matzov unit of the Israeli Defense Force (in Israeli, every male is conscripted…
