Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,823 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
6457

Hostnames

The idea is to come up with some kind of category, so that people have something to remember all the names by. Some categories: Geographical (countries, cities, parks, rivers, lakes, streets), entertainment (flintsones, simpsons, disney films, celebrities), companies (hotels, airports, local shops, restarants)…

6460

Readme Driven Development

I hear a lot of talk these days about TDD and BDD and Extreme Programming and SCRUM and stand up meetings and all kinds of methodologies and techniques for developing better software, but it’s all irrelevant unless the software we’re building meets the needs of those that are using it. Let me put that another way. A…

6469

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…

6471

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.

6477

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…

6479

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…