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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,981 posts.
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Reverse Engineering Strike Commander
Back in the early 90s, one company was on the bleeding edge of PC gaming: Origin Systems . Their motto was "We Create Worlds" and boy did they deliver: With the Ultima series, Crusader series and Wing Commander series, they consistently took gamer's breath away. One of them took four years and more than a million man…
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A Gentle Introduction to Backpropagation
A gentle introduction to backpropagation, a method of programming neural networks
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Doom on ZPU
The last few days I spend some time on porting the beloved game DOOM to the ZPU CPU. For you who don't know what I am talking about, DOOM wa...
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A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404 (2012)
Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the Univer...
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95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong
I’m seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming…when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn’t we be taking the longer view, etc.
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A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
Our knowledge of the composition and structure of the Earth’s interior through direct observation and sampling is limited to the top few ki...
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The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much
Academics constantly complain about being overworked, yet they also praise their freedom to decide how and when to work as one of the great ...
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The Increasing Trend of Online Extortion
I heard about this guy, walked into a federal bank with a portable phone, handed the phone to the teller, the guy on the other end of the phone said: “We got this guy’s little girl, and if you don’t give him all your money, we’re gonna
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The Financial Future of Game Developers
To go back a ways, back in 2006 I suggested that you could look at the winding path a piece of media takes to the public in this way:
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Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain.
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What Happened in 2014?
I’m not much for the rear view mirror. I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in. But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) and explain what is […]
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Great Programmers (2004)
I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…
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Bezier Curves and Type Design: A Tutorial
[2026/09/14]: This article became the most popular I've ever written. Since it was written a long time ago, I decided to rework it: polishing the wording to facilitate comprehension, fixing dead links and typos, and adding interactivity. Still, it remains faithful to the original — a lot of people discussed it and…
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Hidden Costs of Memory Allocation
It’s important to understand the cost of memory allocations, but this cost can be surprisingly tricky to measure. It seems reasonable to measure this cost by wrapping calls to new[] and delet…
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X86 boot sector written in C (2010)
Writing an MS-DOS-compatible boot sector in C: parsing the FAT BIOS parameter block, finding IO.SYS, and loading it via BIOS INT 13h in real mode.
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The Computer Graphics Library
Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…
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Each New Boot a Miracle – DOSBOX in the Browser
This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 sy…
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Querying Time Series in PostgreSQL
A blog about computer programs, databases, and the future of software development.
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Bitcoin Price Pressure
The price of bitcoin keeps trending down. [1] This causes a lot of people to declare the end of bitcoin. It’s important to understand that the default price pressure of the bitcoin ecosystem is...