8671
A promenade of PyTorch
Musings on navigating the tech bubble with philosophy and self-improvement.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.
8672
The Great Theorem Prover Showdown
Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…
8673
Vector Animations with Python (2014)
I am a big fan of Dave Whyte’s vector animations, like this one: It was generated using a special animation language called Processing (here is Dave …
8674
Shell Completions in Rust
If you've ever hit the tab key while typing commands in the shell, you are familiar with the value of shell completions. Bash has some default completion behavior, which is why you can type hel<TAB> and end up with help . It is also possible to add additional completion scripts which define the completion behavior for…
8675
Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game
The story of changing a single byte
8676
Understanding the C/C++ memory model
I know that a lot of people struggle with understanding the memory model introduced in C11/C++11. In a recent conversation I was alerted to the existence of this blog post, which while correct (by …
8677
PostgreSQL 11 Reestablishes Window Functions Leadership
PostgreSQL 11 offers the best OVER clause support among its competitors, true procedures, and improvements in FETCH FIRST and XML.
8678
A Tour of Go - Real examples of interfaces and concurrency
Last week, I gave a talk about Go at the Boston Google Developers Group meeting. There were some problems with the recording, so I have rerecorded the talk as a screencast and posted it on YouTube.
8679
Street Fighter II, Sound System Internals
This article is part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
8680
8681
Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
8682
Stack traces in GHCi, coming in GHC 8.0.1
Bluesky: @simonmar.bsky.social Github: simonmar Email: marlowsd@gmail.com LinkedIn: Simon Marlow
8683
Go’ing Insane: Endless Error Handling
I’ve been using Go for a few years now, mostly in my open source project Lazygit. In my day job I use Ruby and Typescript, and I’ve also spent some time with Rust. Each of those languages have design quirks that can grind a developer’s gears, and although my own precious gears have been ground by every language I’ve…
8684
Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica
Substantial set of new and updated functions in Version 13.1 covers generalized listability, language conveniences, emoji computations, default toolbar, large-scale code editing, drawing in notebooks, Tree expansion, video capture, mathematics, customizable documentation, chemical quantities, machine learning…
8685
Vim is touch-typing on steroids
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
8686
Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014)
Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…
8687
Optimizers need a rethink
Thoughts on how compiler and database optimizers should evolve in the future, focusing on predictability and guarantees instead of smarts and heroics
8688
8689
Tests Are Overhyped
Let me lead off by saying that I don’t think tests are bad. I really don’t. But here’s the thing: I don’t care what your test-code ratios are. You know what the best test-code ratio is? Whatever you need to make sure your crap works while still getting product out the door.
8690
The lat/lon floating point delusion
This morning I had a shower for 6.11686718 minutes. For breakfast I had 189.41576911 ml of fruit juice, followed by 75.24902503 g of muesli topped with 36.55668786 ml of milk and 15.44171338 g of yogurt.
8691
8692
Game Development Post-Unity
What are the options for game developers looking to migrate away from Unity?
8693
Evaluating new software forges
What options are there other than GitHub?
8694
Programming isn’t coding (2020)
When teaching “programming”, a surprisingly small amount of time is spent actually helping students with logic – and a lot helping them learning & managing programming tools.
8695
UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8
On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.
8696
A response about dep and vgo
Peter Bourgon has a web site, and this is that web site.
8697
Making Code Faster
I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster.
8698
Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
ASDF , the de facto standard build system for Common Lisp, has been vastly improved between 2009 and 2014. These and other improvements finally bring Common Lisp up to par with "scripting languages" in terms of ease of writing and deploying portable code that can access and "glue" together functionality from the…
8699
Long Names are Long
One smart thing Google does is rigorous code reviews. Every change, before you can land it, gets reviewed in at least two ways. First, someone on the team does a normal review to make sure the code does what it’s supposed to.
8700