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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,545 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
11403

Algebraic graph calculus (2021)

We describe a graph-theoretic analogue of vector calculus. The linear operators of vector calculus (gradient, divergence, laplacian) correspond to the matrices naturally associated to graphs (incidence matrix, adjacency matrix). This analogy is useful for formalizing the discretization of some problems in image and…

11407

Sparse Matrices (2019)

A sparse matrix is a matrix that has a value of 0 for most elements. If the ratio of N umber of N on- Z ero ( NNZ ) elements to the size is less than 0.5, the matrix is sparse. While this is the mathematical definition, I will be using the term sparse for matrices with only NNZ elements and dense for matrices with all…

11411

ImapGoose

ImapGoose is a small program to keep local mailboxes in sync with an IMAP server. The wording “keep […] in sync” implies that it does so continuously, rather than a one-time sync. ImapGoose is designed as a daemon, monitoring both the IMAP server and the local filesystem, and immediately synchronising changes. When…

11417

Quake 3 Source Code Review

Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…

11418

How mitmproxy works

I started work on mitmproxy because I was frustrated with the available interception tools. I had a long list of minor complaints - they were insufficiently flexible, not programmable enough, mostly written in Java (a language I don't enjoy), and so forth. My most serious problem, though, was opacity. The best tools…