Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 894 posts.

Software Engineering
39

Curl is C

For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →

40

Git git git git git

Ever found you’ve accidentally entered too many gits in your terminal and wondered if there’s a solution to it? I quite often type git then go away and come back, then type a full git status after it. This leads to a lovely (annoying) error out the box: $ git git status git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git…

48

How a 64k intro is made

The demoscene is about producing cool real time works (as in “runs on your computer”) called demos . Some demos are really small, say 64 kilobytes or less, and these are called intros . The name comes from “crack intros”. So an intro is just a demo that’s small.

54

Floating Point Visually Explained

While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…

60

Using tmux properly

In the beginning, it was just me and the (plain) terminal. Then I started using Byobu, because it was company-standard at my first job. Later I installed tmux on my personal computer because it seemed more popular. And every time I work on a remote server, I use Screen. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!