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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,218 posts.
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Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs
This is a technique I’ve used in actual for-pay software, but most recently in my text adventure game editor, Hiss .
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Anti-Patterns Every Programmer Should Be Aware Of
A discussion of software design and programming anti-patterns to know for every programmer, with examples.
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Shortwave Trading: The West Chicago Tower Mystery
Since 2014 this blog has extensively covered the wireless networks built by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms or network providers to reduce latencies between the different exchanges around the wo…
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40 Years of Programming
In April, 1984, my father bought a computer for his home office, a Luxor ABC-802 , with a Z80 CPU, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a yellow-on-black screen with 80 by 25 text mode, or about 160 by 75 pixels in graphics mode, and two floppy drives. It had BASIC in its ROM, and came with absolutely no games. If I wanted to play…
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When FFI Function Calls Beat Native C
Over on GitHub, David Yu has an interesting performance benchmark for function calls of various Foreign Function Interfaces ( FFI ):
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The Death of Cocoa
For many of us, the simplicity, elegance, and performance of Apple’s hardware and software working together are the reason why we build on their platforms. And yet, after just a few months of working with Swift, Cocoa has begun to lose its luster.
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Teeing, a hidden gem in the Java API
Last week, I described a use-case for a custom Stream Collector. I received a intriguing comment on Twitter: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/Miguucm/status/1389258245886390292' Hats off to you, Miguel! Your comment revealed a method I didn’t know! So I decided to investigate…
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The evolution of a structural code editor
This post outlines the evolution of the EYG editor. The major changes over time, design thoughts and some implementation notes.
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Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website.
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South Kensington station's escalator replacement project
Deep underneath South Kensington tube station, a huge project is underway to replace all five of the station's escalators, and all of them at the same time.
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Researchers and Founders
I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these...
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Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing (2017)
My friend gave me permission to hack her, here's how I did it and how to stop it happening to you.
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Talent
“It is generally ill-advised to say 'never' and I'm pleased for you that your grafting has got you to where you wanted to be.”
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Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
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Searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours
searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website. It’s actual size is 6.4 TB. Which is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours. …
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Tech’s Two Philosophies
Google and Facebook represent one philosophy, and Microsoft and Apple represent another; tech needs both, but ultimately platforms are more important than aggregators.
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Random number generator enhancements for Linux 5.17 and 5.18
The random number generator has undergone a few important changes for Linux 5.17 and 5.18, in an attempt to modernize both the code and the cryptography used. The smaller part of these will be released with 5.17 on Sunday, while the larger part will be merged into 5.18 on Monday, which should receive its first release…
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Visiting the annual Braun collectors fair
The Braun+Design Börse is an annual event and fair focusing on Braun products. Braun might not be the design icon it was 40 years ago, but starting in 1955, it profoundly impacted the design world, starting with its cooperation with the Ulm School of Design. With Dieter Rams as
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Qualcomm, National Security, and Patents
The Trump administration blocked Broadcom’s acquisition of Qualcomm, and I think it was the right move. Understanding why means understanding Qualcomm and Broadcom’s plan for the compan…
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One week of empathy training
I've spent a week cosplaying as a disabled user. And I hate it. A couple of months ago, I attended a private talk given by a disabled colleague of mine. "Everyone should believe disabled people's stories about accessibility problems," she said. "But, given that people don't, here's what I want you to do. Spend one…
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The Polygons of Doom: PSX
It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…
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Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices
Given a software code repository together with all commit history, can you spot potentially problematic parts of the software?This is the question I have bee...
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An agent in 100 lines of Lisp
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
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Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?
Netflix put some serious design resources into its Annual Reports pre-2010. What changed?
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There and Snack Again: How to Eat Everything in the Lord of the Rings
In February 2018, my wife & I decided to embark on a gruelling quest: to watch all three Lord of the Rings films (extended editions, of course), while attempting to eat everything that got eaten on screen. We were doing it in memory of my parents, who had both recently died, and who had loved both LOTR and good food…