Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,842 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
18645

Depending in Common Lisp

A while ago I was working on a Common Lisp library that makes use of the Metaobject Protocol . I ran into a few edge cases around dependencies between classes and it took a while for me to figure out how to solve them, so I wanted to write down what I learned in case anyone else might find it useful. This post is an…

18655

Decision Table Patterns

Decision tables are easy, simple, and powerful. You can teach them in five minutes and write one in half that time. You can look at a table and understand what it’s saying, see if it matches your problem, and check for design flaws. So it’s kinda weird that there’s basically nothing about them online. I wrote an…

18656

Path Tracing vs. Ray Tracing (2016)

Path tracing is all the rage in the offline rendering space these days. From Cycles to SuperFly (based on the open source Cycles) to Octane, most new rendering engines seem to be using this technology. Sometimes referred to as “unbiased, physically correct rendering” what is path tracing, how is it different to ray…