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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.

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9819

Simulating RAM in Clojure

“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…

9820

Twenty years, 1998 – 2018

Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…

9823

Why to use ‘python -m pip’

Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply `pip install ...` but now I can'

9830

SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)

A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…

9832

Rust via its Core Values

I have a couple of ideas about learning programming languages. The first is that we do it wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You try learning a new language and can’t quite see how it all works. Why do I use this syntax here and some other syntax over here? We get frustrated by all the weird bits and go back to…