Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.
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…
The FILTER clause extends aggregate functions (SUM, AVG, COUNT, etc.) with an additional WHERE clause. Databases not supporting FILTER can use CASE within the aggregate function instead.
There is a terminology problem in the Rails community. Everyone promotes Rails as a MVC framework. I did that as well. However, the truth ...
This morning, I came accross Cameron Sun’s Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe on HN . However, the comments were disappointing, with people proposing probabilistic models, linear programming, minimax algorithms, and heuristic evaluations to develop AI approaches for the game, none of which quite correct. In this post, I’ll…
An overview of ray tracing denoising, reviewing filtering, spatiotemporal, sampling and AI techniques to improve convergence and temporal coherency in real time ray traced applications.
When learning a new programming language, there is usually a table in the documentation that shows the various operators that can be used with numbers.
A post by August Lilleaas, published April 20, 2018.
I have a shameful confession to make: I have long neglected an open-source library that I maintain, clj-tagsoup .
A perfect hash function is one that is collision-free. By implication, the hash must be at least as many bytes as the key and the function is theoretically reversible, though not always tractably so. In other words, perfect hashing is a special case of encryption. Because the hash is no smaller than the key, the…
For a bit more than a year now, I've been interested in Rust , a programming language by Mozilla research that “runs blazingly fast, prevents nearly all segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.” It is as low-level as C or C++, has a nice type system (with generics and traits), a helpful compiler, and a…
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
For a while now I've been trying to find a good way to explain what structured concurrency is, and how it applies to Rust. I've come up with zingers such as: "Structured concurrency is structured programming as applied to concurrent control-flow primitives" . But that requires me to start explaining what structured…
Clojure macros have two modes: avoid them at all costs/do very basic stuff, or go absolutely crazy.
Hit the play button above and it will play music; specifically, music composed with (or at least, compatible with) a program released in 1994 called FastTracker 2; this is a Javascript homage I wrote in a fit of nostalgia. The source code is on GitHub if you'd like to check it out.
The TodoMVC implemented in Kobold weighs about 30kb when gzipped over the wire, out of which the gzipped Wasm blob is under 20kb. There are no tricks there . I haven't replaced the default allocator, nor have I minified the JavaScript (although I probably should).
One reason to know how your data structures work is so that when your problem has unusual constraints you can tweak how they work to fit the problem better or work faster. In this article I’ll talk about four different fun tweaks to the concept of a hash table that I made in the process of using hash tables to…
Getting started with shaders: signed distance functions!
My house knows when people are using the wifi, and keeps the inverter on so that the satellite internet is powered up, unless the battery is too low. When nobody is using the wifi, the inverter turns off, except when it's needed to power the fridge.
After a rather long break from programming and Clojure I decided give them another go. When it comes to managing Clojure projects, Leiningen is de-facto standard tool. Recently, Clojure CLI tools are becoming more and more popular, though. Switching to yet-another-build-tool doesn't have any pragmatic value, but it's…
Amber on Rails
This story is about concurrent data structures in the context of Ruby. The goal here is to demonstrate how true parallelism can be achieved with global mutable state (which at the time of writing, is not supported by built-in Ruby primitives).
I spent a lot of time working on a project in which physically plausible simulation of soft materials with pressure chambers was a key part, and in doing so, we managed to improve a part of our simulation by a significant amount. I was very happy with how this small part of the whole system turned out, and I've been…
As someone who is interested in systems programming, and has experience working with Go, but not with C or C++1, The Odin language is a great fit. Proper systems language Odin is a systems langauge…
Between the Material You design and move to break apart the Chrome browser from ChromeOS, now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment.
Some time later, I came across Iavor’s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called “ The Evolution of a Programmer ” in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment’s thought turned up the factorial…
