The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
Years ago, while taking a numerical methods course, I wrote some code to calculate the expected number of shared birthdays in a group. The code is very simple: each attempt constructs a vector of N birthdays, then counts the duplicates. The outer loop runs millions of attempts, and calculates the mean number of shared…
“ The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.” – Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial by Marwan Burelle and then sitting down and trying to write my own implementation, so the steps are going to be fairly similar. The main implementation differences are that my version is simpler and more vulnerable to memory…
Recently, after being awake for longer than I should have, I started thinking about methods of remembering the number of days in each month of the year. There is a rhyme for it, and a way to count on your knuckles, but these didn’t satisfy me. I wondered if there was a mathematical formula for the problem, and upon…
I first fell in love with XSL in 1999, when Microsoft rolled an XSLT processor into MSXML. I got my hands on the works of Shakespeare marked up in XML
Do you remember how we first met, back in 2012? I thought your functional approach was fresh, and different. For a while I believed we were made for each other. A first project was a success; on my own I was comfortable with the good parts of you. But as soon as I started working in teams writing Scala, your immense…
I've been building enterprise Java web apps since servlets were created. In that time the Java ecosystem has changed a lot but sadly many enterprise Java…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
This post walks through a conversion funnel analysis that wouldn’t be possible in PostgreSQL 9.2
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
My dad used to say, “Slow down, son. You’ll get the job done faster.” I’ve worked in many high-tech startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area. I am now 52, and I progr…
This post presents Vapory, a library I wrote to bring POV-Ray’s 3D rendering capabilities to Python. POV-ray is a popular 3D rendering software which …
A couple of months ago, Trixter of Hornet released a demo called "8088 Domination", which shows off real-time video and audio playback on t...
Developing Opinions - A blog by Jimmy Breck-McKye
In September, 2004, I posted a query to the Types list asking people to name the five most important papers ever written in the area of programming languages. This page collects the responses I received. (A few are missing because I am still tracking down bibliographic information.)
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
“ Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. ” – Edsger Dijkstra
