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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,547 posts.
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Bithacks.h - bit hack macros
A part of being a great programmer is having your personal code library. With a personal code library I mean a repository of code that you have an intimate knowledge of and that you can reuse quickly. If you are a C programmer, you don't want to reimplement linked lists, trees, various utility functions, macros and...
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Why Continuous Deployment?
Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a p...
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The Y Combinator in Arc and Java
I was recently reading The Little Schemer , a very intersting book about how to think in Scheme. The book uses a unique question-response ...
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How We Made Our Face Recognizer 25x Faster
This is a war story from my real day job. I work at a start-up company in Pittsburgh that does face detection, tracking, and recognition software. This particular problem involved optimization of the face recognizer.
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The Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely Must Know About Unicode (2003)
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
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Maze-generation algorithms, with JS demos
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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Floating-Point Determinism (2013)
Is IEEE floating-point math deterministic? Will you always get the same results from the same inputs? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Unfortunately the answer is also an unequivocal “no”. I’m a…
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Where Lisp Fails: at Turning People into Fungible Cogs
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems , "the library question" (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation - one…
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Why is programming fun?
Why is programming fun? An extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) book, The Mythical Man-Month. Fred Brooks coined the term "no silver bullet" that is famous in the field of computers.
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The Seven Stages of the Programmer
Before he takes the first step, the programmer does not know that programming exists. He is aware of computers, but has never considered how they actually work. He feels the process of making a video game is somewhat akin to making a film, or perhaps writing a book. If someone were to ask him how that actually works…
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Djng - a Django powered microframework
djng is nearly two weeks old now, so it’s about time I wrote a bit about the project. I presented a keynote at EuroDjangoCon in Prague earlier this month entitled …
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Visualization of the Grammars of Ruby, Java and Javascript
As part of the momentum surrounding the Ruby implementer’s summit , I have decided to take on a pet project to understand Ruby’s grammar better, with the goal of contributing to an implementation-independent specification of the grammar. Matz mentioned during his keynote how parse.y was one of the uglier parts of Ruby…
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Clojure N00b Tips from Tim Bray
Clojure is the new hotness among people who think the JVM is an interesting platform for post-Java languages, and for people who think there’s still life in that ol’ Lisp beast, and for people who worry about concurrency and state in the context of the multicore future. Over the last few days I’ve been severely…
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Differential Synchronization (2009)
Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.
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Release Late, Release Rarely (2006)
When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk.
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Zero to Riding the Rails in Four Months
Whew! four months of nose-to-the-keyboard development work, and we launched our new product! Because it was the first time we designed, developed, and deployed a complete web application with our n…
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Worlds: Tabs for Programming by Alan Kay
Via Lambda the Ultimate a pointer to a paper by Alessandro Warth and Alan Kay (PDF) called "Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects". I didn't get as much out of reading the abstract as I did from the opening paragraphs of the intro: Suppose that, while browsing the...
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