Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.

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2552

Allocators in Rust

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Rust’s allocator story, and in particular our relationship to jemalloc. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I wanted to try and summarize my understanding and explain for others what is going on. I am trying to be as factually precise in this post as possible. If you see a…

2554

Write Yourself a Haskell in Lisp

For me, the best way to understand something is usually to implement it myself. So when I first started getting serious about Haskell, I implemented (in Common Lisp) a simple lazy functional programming language that used graph rewriting for the interpretation. Then, years later, I mentioned this implementation in a…

2562

Better Than JSON?

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

2565

Things from Python I'd miss in Go

Let's assume Go has one killer feature – cheap concurrency – not present in any other language with similar serial performance (ruling out say Erlang). And let's agree that it gives Go its perfect niche – and we're only discussing uses of Go outside that niche from now on. So we won't come back to concurrency till the…

2567

Inventing Monads

I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?

2571

My Weird Ruby

Over the past year, I've been rewriting large portions of the Middleman codebase to better reflect how I like to write code (as opposed to the silly version of me who did the original version 6 years ago). I've learned a lot since then, spent pretty much every day writing mostly Javascript and trying to find any…

2574

Real time bidding in Erlang (2012)

I'm still on my way back from the Bay Area Erlang Factory 2012 (in fact I finished this post after coming back entirely), in San Francisco, and I've been starting to see a bunch of twitter posts regarding people posting their slides online. Although it is a good idea, I tend to view my slides as pure visual support…