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Smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
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PostgreSQL beginner guide
It looks like nothing was found at this location. May be please check the URL for typing errors or start a new search to find the page you are looking for.
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Annotated code: Circles bouncing off lines
Uses some simple trigonometry to calculate the movement of circles bouncing off lines.
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Improvements to the Xerox Alto Mandelbrot drop runtime from 1 hour to 9 minutes
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...
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Looking at your program’s structure in Go 1.7
Go 1.7—out today!—features an new SSA-based compiler backend. SSA is a method of describing low-level operations like loads and stores that roughly map to machine instructions, with the special difference that SSA acts as though it has infinite number...
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The unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzing for porting programs
A simple strategy of having LLMs write fuzz tests and build up a port in topological order seems effective at automating porting from C to Rust.
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Scalable, Resilient Brainfuck
Building Brainf∗ck interpreter for the 21 century, with all the best systems design practices in mind. Think of Brainf∗ck-as-a-service cloud solution!
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Number plate recognition with Tensorflow
Over the past few weeks I’ve been dabbling with deep learning, in particular convolutional neural networks . One standout paper from recent times is Google’s Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View . This paper describes a system for extracting house numbers from street view imagery using a single end-to-end…
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A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
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Implementing a Convolutional Neural Network from Scratch in Python
A simple guide to what CNNs are, how they work, and how to build one from scratch in Python.
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Inheritance was invented as a performance hack
It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula . The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look.
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Why Developers Never Use State Machines
Why developers rarely use state machines, seeing them as overkill until it's too late to switch, and what the state_machine gem did for CrowdHired.
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Unix as IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
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WSL2 can now mount Linux ext4 disks directly
If you're on a version of Windows 11 that is build 22000 or greater, you can ...
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.NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
In this post I discuss the support for union types released in .NET 11, how they're implemented, the choices made, and how to create your own
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Zig's Lovely Syntax
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
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What's New in POSIX 2024
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
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Fast Rust Builds
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
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A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
If you don't you're not alone. Right now, as I'm typing this, 4 of the top 4 Google results for "find command linux" contain at least one example of the pattern illustrated by the command above.
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How to Get Fired Using Switch Statements and Statement Expressions
Updated Oct 27, 2016: Fixed sample code comments in coroutine example as per suggestion , edited text to note D's similar behaviour .
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When I reject AI code even if it works
AI can make implementation cheap while making review and judgment more expensive.
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I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance
I needed to choose a framework for a mobile-first app at work. I started comparing Next.js, SolidStart, and SvelteKit, then expanded to 10 frameworks. The measurements revealed dramatic differences in bundle sizes, performance, and the real cost of framework choices.
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10000 things all CS students should do before graduating
It’s Commencement time! So I thought I’d compile a list of 1010 10000 things I believe all ICS students should have done (by themselves) by the time they get their diplomas. With luck, students have come across some of these in courses. Most likely, that won’t happen, so students need to make time for extra-curricular…
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The logging framework isn't a bottleneck, and other lies your laptop tells you
Your laptop spends all day lying to you. If you want your code to run well on server hardware, best write it on server hardware.
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