Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,833 posts.
The Story Of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather ( < nather@astro.as.utexas.edu > ), on May 21, 1983.
PyPy has moved to Git, GitHub
PyPy has moved its canonical repo and issue tracker from https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/pypy to https://github.com/pypy/pypy. Obviously, this means development will now be tracked in Git rather than M
Let's talk about joins
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
I rewrote a Clojure tool in Rust
About two years ago, I wrote a quite complicated diff tool in Clojure. It was complicated enough that I struggled to fit the algorithm in my head and the inputs were large enough that I had to make some efforts to improve performance.
A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test
Yarn tests fail consistently at the 27-second mark. The usual suspects are swiftly eliminated to no avail. A deep dive is taken to comb through traces, only to be derailed into an unexpected crash investigation.
Writing a Kubernetes Operator
Basic introduction to Kubernetes Operators and Controllers, with a tutorial on creating an Operator in Rust
What's in the Box?
Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week: …or we could just box it. There’s two remarkable things about this sentence. The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and in...
A railroad simulation using discrete event simulation
In our previous post, we introduced how to utilize Discrete Event Simulation (DES) in PicoLisp. Now, let's explore another application: a railroad model…
Using any C++ library in Godot
How Godot's GDExtension system and the godot-cpp bindings work, and how to use Conan to bring C and C++ libraries into a Godot game, with a flecs example that simulates 100,000 particles.
Building bots to mend badges, or how to get your GitHub account suspended
TL;DR: Many badges were broken since they were using the shuttered pypip.in site. I wrote a bot that could fix these and automatically submit pull requests with the changes. And then I had my GitHub account suspended. Do not make automatic unsolicited pull requests. Disclaimer This post discusses the design...
Emacs’s Builtin Elisp Cheat Sheet
Emacs now has a builtin cheat sheet for a large swathe of common elisp functions. If you can't remember exactly how to do something, then this is a great place to look for it first.
Two Objects Not Namespaced by the Linux Kernel (2017)
Covers two Linux primitives that are not namespaced by the current set of Linux kernel namespaces.
The pull request hack is fucking magic
I don't have time to keep up with all the daft Open Source projects I release. I wish my skill and my energy was as wide as my ambition. Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer's Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple - if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them…
Hiding messages in x86 binaries using semantic duals
This is a quick writeup of a steganographic tool that I threw together: steg86 . It uses a quirk of the x86 instruction encoding format to hide messages in pre-existing binaries with no size or performance overhead.
On the Cleverness of Compilers
The “Sufficiently Clever Compiler” has become something of a trope in the Lisp community: the mythical beast that promises language and interface designers near-unlimited freedom, and leaves their output in a performance lurch by its non-appearance. A few years ago, I was young enough to join a research project to…
Material UI v1 for React is out
React components that implement Google’s Material Design.
Reverse Debugging for Python
RevPDB A "reverse debugger" is a debugger where you can go forward and backward in time. It is an uncommon feature, at least in the open ...
The State of Vacuum in Postgres
In a recent blog post , I talked about why every system that implements MVCC needs some scheme for removing old row versions, and how VACUUM...
PyTorch Native Architecture Optimization: Torchao
We’re happy to officially launch torchao, a PyTorch native library that makes models faster and smaller by leveraging low bit dtypes, quantization and sparsity. torchao is an accessible toolkit of techniques written...
NYTimes Opensources Their Deep Linking JS
We’ve released an update to “Emphasis,” the feature that enables paragraph-specific anchor links and highlighted text. We’re also putting the source on GitHub for everyone to use.
AWS Lambda: Run Java Code in Response to Events
Many AWS customers are using AWS Lambda to build clean, straightforward applications that handle image and document uploads, process log files from AWS CloudTrail, handle data streamed from Amazon Kinesis, and so forth. With the recently launched synchronous invocation capability, Lambda is fast becoming a favorite…
Machine Learning in JavaScript
I love machine learning algorithms. I've taught classes and seminars and given talks on ML. The subject is fascinating to me, but like all skills fascination simply isn't enough. To get good at something, you need to practice! I also happen to be a PHP and JavaScript developer.
Intuiting Pratt Parsing
You already know that a + b * c + d is calculated as a + (b * c) + d. But how do you encode that knowledge precisely enough for a machine to act on it?
I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month
Recent years showed the growth of technologies like wildfire. With the spread of COVID-19, most businesses started adopting cutting-edge technologies. Technology has been playing a very important role in both our personal and professional life. This has increased the demand for experienced and skilled IT professionals…