Top posts

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

Software Engineering
Any year
10086

Indices Point Between Elements

If you’re familiar with nearly any mainstream programming language, and I asked you to draw a diagram of an array, the array indices, and the array elements, odds are good you’d produce a diagram something like this: In this post, I want to persuade you to replace that image, or, at least, to augment it with an…

10091

100,000 DOM Updates

Click the table of zeroes once. Note that the text input field remains responsive even as we run 100,000 updates on the DOM. The colors of the table show the render batching boundaries. Note, I would not try this on a mobile device ;)

10098

Faster DOM

There is a pretty good comment on Hacker News (of all places) by nostrademons explaining why the DOM is not slow . Basically, all the DOM mutation operations are pretty trivial. Inserting and removing nodes, moving them around, setting an attribute, etc. It’s layout that takes a while and layout can be synchronously…

10107

How to exfiltrate code from Bitbucket

Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…

10108

Porting SBCL to the RISC-V

What better thing to do, during the hot, hot July days, thank something semi-mechanical involving very little brain power? With student-facing work briefly calming down (we've just about weathered the storm of appeals and complaints following the publication of exam results), and the all-too-brief Summer holidays…