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Index of /
Personal blog · garethrees.orgprogrammingsystems
Index of / is a personal blog at garethrees.org about programming and systems. Since 2011, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “The puzzle structure of Ocarina of Time”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Gareth Rees's posts on software archaeology, stack terminology (hot and cold ends), PNG and SVG size reduction, and Python coverage. One commenter cites his 1995 text adventure Christminster.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The puzzle structure of Ocarina of Time2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-04
- Round trip2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-15
- The stack of iterators pattern2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-17
- Plan to throw one away2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-14
What Hacker News says?
No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest insights besides the Singularity: * A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems af…
Comment linking /2013/06/12/archaeology/
on “Vernor Vinge has died”Submitted Plan to throw one away as a story · 492 points
HN discussionIt was Gareth Rees. https://garethrees.org/2001/12/04/python-coverage/
Comment linking /2001/12/04/python-coverage/
on “Bug #915: Please help”Submitted Emacs/Perforce integration: a retrospective as a story · 25 points
HN discussionI found Knuth’s “Dancing Links” paper [1] very well written and a somewhat easy read (I had to reread certain parts a couple times). I had to write a sudoku solver for one of my classes and I read that dancing links and algorithm x was one way to do it [2]. I then read some things around the internet to apply dancing links to sudoku solving [3] [4]. If you read the Wikipedia entry on exact cover problems there is a…
Comment linking /2007/06/10/zendoku-generation/
on “Ask HN: What was the best CS paper you read in 2017?”Submitted Round trip as a story · 17 points
HN discussionAs an aside, but I think relevant to Hacker News, the author of this blog post also wrote the classic mid-1990s text adventure game Christminster http://garethrees.org/1995/08/08/christminster/
Comment linking /1995/08/08/christminster/
on “Plan to throw one away”Submitted Smallest Possible PNG as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIn addition, every additional setting multiplies the number of states your application can be in, and the combinatorial explosion of states is mostly not well-tested. If you set even a handful settings to non-default values, it's likely that you are running the application in a totally unique configuration that's not used by any other developer or user. If you encounter bugs, you're liable to get the "Idk, it works…
Comment linking /2013/06/13/options/
on “Things end users care about but programmers don't”Submitted Sudoku solver using Knuth’s dancing links as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat would be Stanislaw Lem's most depressing but aptly named masterpiece, "Fiasco". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel) http://garethrees.org/2012/05/31/fiasco/ 2. Radio static A radiolocation map of the planet showed hundreds of transmitters of white noise, which merged into shapeless blotches. Quinta was emitting noise on all wavelengths. In the Cold War theory: “What came to mind was an image of “radio…
Comment linking /2012/05/31/fiasco/
on “A Cyberattack 'the World Isn’t Ready For'”Submitted What's wrong with the Oxford English Dictionary's etymology for 'hobbit'? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt looks to me as though the recommendation that RankRed has titled "Rule No. 5 — Low Assertion Density" would be better described as "High Assertion Density" — the recommendation is for a minimum of two assertions per function (and functions are supposed to be short per rule 4). The recommendations look good to me and (with one caveat) correspond to rules that I apply when writing C code with a high reliability req…
Comment linking /2007/04/24/relational-macros/
on “The Power of Ten – Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code”Submitted Plan to throw one away as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe case for reducing the size of SVG is the same as for any kind of web asset: it reduces the initial transmission time (and improves the likelihood of a cache hit) and so reduces the time taken to load the page. I doubt if it's worthwhile squeezing the last couple of bytes of gzip compression out of an image (other than as a fun and informative exercise), but when programmatically generating SVGs it's easy to do s…
Comment linking /2013/08/02/svg/
on “Of SVG, Minification and Gzip”Submitted A localization failure as a story · 2 points
HN discussionVernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. < https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ > (Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It…
Comment linking /2013/06/12/archaeology/
on “How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?”Submitted The stack of iterators pattern as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReally interesting subject since its one most people don't pay much attention to. Here is a relevant article which explains how to create the smallest possible PNG: http://garethrees.org/2007/11/14/pngcrush/
Comment linking /2007/11/14/pngcrush/
on “A 106 kilobyte color profile for a 3 kilobyte image file”Submitted The puzzle structure of Ocarina of Time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI really like the nomenclature described by my coworker Gareth Rees: stack has hot and cold ends. The terms of top and bottom just confuse everything. https://garethrees.org/2018/03/12/stack/
Comment linking /2018/03/12/stack/
on “Where the top of the stack is on x86 (2011)”Submitted User options considered harmful as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>The same code base passed down though generations. >Legacy code. Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. < https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeol…
Comment linking /2013/06/12/archaeology/
on “Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer(2016)”Submitted Software archaeology and technical debt (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion>I have a very low tolerance for rewrites so we go in hard against companies offering them: we make far far more profit than any of them; we run well over 50% with far less risk. Once I discovered containers (chroots in the late 90s and now docker etc), I knew rewriting things is never needed. Vernor Vinge figured this out 25 years ago. A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future,…
Comment linking /2013/06/12/archaeology/
on “Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?”Submitted The Origin of ‘Hobbit’ as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAlso there is a part 2 which isn’t linked in the article: http://garethrees.org/2015/12/15/sql/
Comment linking /2015/12/15/sql/
on “Plan to throw one away”Submitted The stack of iterators pattern as a story · 1 points
HN discussionVernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. < https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ > You've made a contribution to the hoard that someone will b…
Comment linking /2013/06/12/archaeology/
on “My "retirement" project: Release 40 years worth of my "source code"”Submitted The puzzle structure of Ocarina of Time [2004] as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
