Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
A common example of recursion is the function to calculate the $n$-th Fibonacci number: def naive_fib(n): if n < 2: return n else: return naive_fib(n-1) + naive_fib(n-2) This follows the mathematical definition very closely but it’s performance is terrible: roughly $\mathcal{O}(2^n)$. This is commonly patched up with…
Web developer, standards and engineering nerd, cocktail enthusiast, maker.
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
The libsodium cryptographic library added support for WebAssembly back in 2017.
We should expect Apple to lead the industry on this front, but in fact, they’re far behind.
In 2000, the programmatic browser differences were perplexing, so I made a tool to help manage the problem. I started with something similar to ecomcon (see How JavaScript Works , Chapter 23). I would have special markers in the source that designated sections of code that would only be delivered to particular…
Communicating Sequential Processes and Python coroutines as a structured approach to concurrency.
Today is my last day at IBM. If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.” As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional…
BREAKING NEWS: I’ve received tenure at Harvard! I want to thank all of the enemies that I had to destroy to achieve this great honor. Roger Davis at Princeton’s department of nutrition—you questioned my research on the efficacy of an…
Over the years, I picked up a number of tricks to optimize code. Today I’ll talk about one of them.
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
People who search for me in Google see a Google-generated box which incorrectly says that I am Israeli. Google has ignored my complaints about this; they dont seem to care about the accuracy of the…
This is a personal website, at the outskirts of the web, away from social media and publishing platforms.
Previously: Card Balance and Artifact, Artifact Embraces Card Balance Changes, Review: Artifact Epistemic Status: Looks pretty dead Artifact had every advantage. Artifact should have been great. Ar…
This is a post about performance. Most of the time when worrying about the performance of a piece of code the overwhelming advice should be (with apologies to Brendan Gregg) don’t worry about it, yet. However there is one area where I counsel developers to think about the performance implications of a design, and that…
I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief fora…
In 1981, the BBC set out to educate Great Britain about computers. It did a really good job.
"Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code . The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks…
Techniques for keeping your app code under control even when requirements shift dramatically.
Please click or tap in the gray square below. It will fill with a jolly tableau of colored disks—first big blue ones, then somewhat smaller purple ones, and eventually lots of tiny red dots.
An entry on some of the cleverest (and clearest) functional designs I've worked on, and how it came to be
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Despite the goal of JSON being a subset of JavaScript — which it failed to achieve (update: this was fixed ) — parsing JSON is quite unlike parsing a programming language. For invalid inputs, the specific cause of error is often counter-intuitive. Normally this doesn’t matter, but I recently ran into a case where it…
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
Synchronizing threads at a lower level.
