Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.
The future of Deep Learning frameworks
Assumed audience: ML researchers who frequently work with PyTorch , but are interested in trying out JAX or have yet to be convinced.
Now you're thinking with relays
Tinkering with relay-based logic just for the fun of it.
Let's write a treesitter major mode for Emacs
Creating a standard programming major mode presents significant challenges, with the intricate tasks of establishing proper indentation and font highlighting being among the two hardest things to get right. It's painstaking work, and it'll quickly descend into a brawl between the font lock engine and your desire for…
PostgreSQL example of self-contained stored procedures
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Tree traversal without recursion: the tree as a state machine (2007)
I am currently working my way through Higher-Order Perl , a highly recommended tome on effective and practical use of functional programming techniques in Perl. As you’d expect from a book that spends a lot of time discussing such concepts as function composition and recursion, the subject of tree traversal makes a…
Amiga Systems Programming in 2023
If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer…
Beginner's guide to OCaml beginner's guides
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
Game Engine Black Book Postmortem
I am pleased to announce that the Game Engine Black Book about Wolfenstein 3D has shipped. It is 316 pages, full color and made of three parts describing the hardware of 1991, id Software tools, and the game engine internals. You can read a preview on Google Books and buy it here:
The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026
A lot of progress was made since last year, and I made some of it!
Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
Finding a kernel regression in half an hour with git bisect run (2018)
The git bisect command helps you identify the first commit in a range that broke something. You give it a good commit and a bad one, and it will do a binary search between the two to find the first bad commit. At each step, you say either git bisect …
Conway's Game of Life, but musical
Breed unique melodies with genetic algorithms! Explore Conway's musical life and cultural evolution patterns. Interactive AI music lab
The engineering behind Figma's vector networks (2019)
A deep dive into the world of vector networks, and the engineering challenges involved in their implementation.
Understanding delete in Javascript
How the delete operator really works: property attributes, DontDelete, undeclared assignments, Gecko and IE bugs, and what ES5 strict mode changes.
"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso's personal website.
JSDoc is TypeScript
In May of 2023 an internal refactoring PR from the Svelte repo made it to the front page of the Hacker News forums. The (superficially) controversial PR seem...
The Tragedy of UCS-2
Apropos of nothing, I'd like to tell you a tale. It's not an original tale, but it's one of my favorites.
A simplified model of Fil-C
I've seen lots of chatter about Fil-C recently, which pitches itself as a memory safe implementation of C/C++. You can read the gritty details of how this is achieved, but for people coming across it for the first time, I think there is value in showing a simplified version, as once you've understood the simplified…
Managing State with Signals
An experiment of using incremental computations for managing state in Humble UI
The sad state of property-based testing libraries
Property-based testing is a rare example of academic research that has made it to the mainstream in less than 30 years. Under the slogan “don’t write tests, generate them” property-based testing has gained support from a diverse group of programming language communities. In fact, the Wikipedia page of the original…
Fat JSON
Most server-side APIs these days are JSON-over-HTTP. Developers are generally comfy with this, but I notice when I look at the JSON that it’s often, uh, what’s the tactful term these days? Let’s say “generously proportioned”. And I see clumsy code being written to walk through it. The options for dealing with this are…
How to track and display profile views on GitHub
GitHub has introduced READMEs for profiles that allow to display profile views