12631
Meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity
Discussion on notions of software complexity as defined by Rich Hickey, John Ousterhout and Zach Tellman.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,546 posts.
12632
Ruby Fiber Scheduler
Ruby can work asynchronously with just a Fiber Scheduler and a couple built-in methods - no frameworks are required! It's easy to use, scales well, and has amazing performance benefits.
12633
August 2016 Lisp Game Jam Postmortem
The August 2016 Lisp Game Jam just wrapped up at the end of last week. I had some free time so I decided to take part, but I did something a bit different. Instead of making a new game I ported an existing one ( Silt ) to Common Lisp.
12634
A Faster Lexer in Go
It's been a while since I've last rewritten my favorite lexical analyzer :-) That post is the last in a series implementing a lexer for the TableGen language in a variety of programming languages, using multiple techniques. The last lexer written, in Go, was very fast indeed - processing 1 MiB of source in about 20…
12635
12636
12637
A Gentle Introduction to Data Compression
Joe Bertolami's portfolio and blog covering artificial intelligence, game development, computer graphics, data compression, and more.
12638
Software occlusion culling in Block Game
My GPU is the integrated Radeon Vega 8 that comes with my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. I tell you this so you know that my workstation is not a graphical computing powerhouse. It is, in fact, quite weak. To its credit my integrated GPU shows up as 48% faster on UserBenchmark than the GPU in my low end hardware target; a…
12639
From NAND to Raytracer: Raytracing on the Hack Computer
I recently spent some time going through the amazing nand2tetris course, and assignment #9 is to implement something with the Jack programming language that runs on the Hack computer. My friend encouraged me to try writing a raytracer, which is an algorithm that generates physically realistic images by simulating…
12640
Liskov's Reading List for Computer Scientists
Barbara Liskov pointed us in her talk at Heidelberg Laureate Forum to some interesting “must-reads” for computer scientists. The talks will be available here: http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/ . I strongly recommend to watch many talks – including hers.
12641
Squeezing Performance from SQLite: EXPLAINing the Virtual Machine
The virtual machine? Yep, but not the Java Virtual Machine.
12642
Formal Methods in Building Robust Distributed Systems
We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising…
12643
Forbidden Emacs Lisp Knowledge: Block Comments
Note : The \037 sequence appearing in the code snippets is one character, escaped for readability.
12644
Fuzzing with AFL is an Art
Using one of the test cases from the previous post , I examine what affects AFL's ability to find a bug placed by LAVA in a program. Along ...
12645
Defeating Racket’s separate compilation guarantee
Being a self-described programming-language programming language is an ambitious goal. To preserve predictability while permitting linguistic extension, Racket comes equipped with a module system carefully designed to accommodate composable and compilable macros . One of the module system’s foundational properties is…
12646
Tabasco Sort: a super-optimal merge sort
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
12647
12648
12649
12650
Why checked exceptions failed
Programming language features are never orthogonal.
12651
Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?
Traditionally C++ has been seen by many (and you know who you are) as just plain bad: the code is unreadably verbose, error messages are und...
12652
Orthodox C++ (2016)
Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
12653
The lack of namespaces on crates.io is a feature
Rust doesn’t have namespaces in its package management system. It’s often viewed as a bug. But it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! While there are negative aspects of a flat package registry, there are also real benefits. Stability, continuity, and unity (discourages forks and fragmented identity)…
12654
Beware of strncpy and strncat
Most C programmers also know to avoid the legacy strcpy() and strcat() functions, as these commonly introduce buffer-overflow problems. Instead, C programmers should use the newer strncpy() and strncat() functions, which check the size of the buffer they're copying data into.
12655
Crazy fast build times, or when 10 seconds starts to make you nervous (2012)
Firstly this is not just my effort but my team and organisation. Secondly the usual rules apply, this is expert advise and what works for me will very probably cause your whole production stack to blow up and kill people. Lastly this is long so skip to the bit you care about or come along and chat at QCon London 2012
12656
The Functional Programming Hiring Problem
If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypothetical functional programming language called Gooby. In these discussions, often someone…
12657
Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers
In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.
12658
No Comment
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
12659
12660
Computer science is not software engineering
Wow, college was such a waste of time ... when did you ever invert a binary tree outside of an interview? Honestly I never inverted a binary tree in college either ☹️