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GoAWK: an AWK interpreter written in Go
How I wrote GoAWK, how I tested it, and how I measured and improved its performance.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,221 posts.
17582
How I use Kate editor
I love the Kate Text editor. I use it for pretty much all the programming projects I do.…
17583
Two Letters from Steve Jobs
During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes. Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard insi…
17584
Do something, so we can change it
A habit for addressing two-way decisions.
17585
When Abandoned Mines Collapse
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In December of 2024, a huge sinkhole opened up on I-80 near Wharton, New Jersey, creating massive traffic delays as crews worked to figure out what happened and get it fixed. Since then, it happened again in February 2025 and th
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iOS 8 Privacy Updates
A summary of all iOS 8 Security and Privacy updates and their importance.
17587
The Second Edition of “Refactoring”
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
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Executable Examples in Go
Did you know that Go lets us provide executable code examples as part of our documentation? It’s pretty neat. Let’s take a tour of this useful feature and see how it works.
17590
The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
17591
Anna: A Fast, Scalable, Flexibly Consistent Key-Value Store
There’s fast and there’s fast. This post is about Anna*, a key/value database design from our team at Berkeley that’s got phenomenal speed and buttery smooth scaling, with an unpr…
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I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
And how YOU can too!
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Deep Text Correcter
Alex Paino's Personal Site and Blog
17594
How I made the print and eBook versions of my web book
It’s a funny feeling to spend nearly six years making something and then finally hold it in your hand. It’s simultaneously, “This is it! ” and “Is this it?” How can it be so small when it feels like such a big piece of my life?
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How to become a part-time programmer
For some people, a 40-hour workweek is something to aspire to; for others, it’s still too much time taken up by a job. If you fall into that second category, if you want more time for hobbies, family and friends, or working on your own software projects, you too might dream of working less than full time. But how do…
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Bookmarklets I Use
Hi, my name is Philipp! This is my personal website, where I write stuff with inconsistent frequency.
17597
She went to sleep and woke up 30 years later (1998)
The real-life story of Annie Shapiro - who fell into a coma at age 50 in 1963 - is more remarkable than the movie based on her miraculous re-awakening.
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Searching for Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim has left the internet.
17599
The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.
At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mo…
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The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network
subsea cables, internet infrastructure, telecom infrastructure, 2Africa, new subsea cable projects, layer 1 pricing on key international routes,
17601
Hidden gems of moreutils
It seems no matter how long I work with the command line, every once in a while I find handy utilities I've never encountered before. Most people have heard about the bird coreutils , that's where utilities such as echo , cat , and others come from. But did you know about moreutils ?
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One Year of TILs
Just over a year ago I started tracking TILs, inspired by Josh Branchaud’s collection. I’ve since published 148 TILs across 43 different topics. It’s a great format! TIL stands for …
17603
Writing systemd units that stop gracefully before shutdown
systemd Shutdown Units
17604
A decades-old bug in Knuth's long division (TAOCP Vol II, Algorithm 4.3.1D)
A long division story
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High-performance .NET by example: Filtering bot traffic
Mistakes and lessons from a real-world feature performance optimizations: from API usage to advanced data structures, from bit hacks to CPU-friendlier code.
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1960s IT department
In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women…
17608
I built a vector map from scratch
How I Built a Vector Map from Scratch
17609
Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers
One of my favorite game jams is the legendary Js13kGames competition, where participants have one month to make a web browser game that fits in a 13 kilobyte zip file. To put that into perspective,…
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Image Compression
Exploiting the quirks of human vision to make images smaller, without looking awful.