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Pointers Gone Wild
Personal blog · pointersgonewild.comprogrammingsystems
Pointers Gone Wild is a personal blog at pointersgonewild.com about programming and systems. Since 2014, 74 different Hacker News readers have linked it 122 times, most often “They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Pointers Gone Wild
Most-linked posts?
- They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken5 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-11-02
- The Alternative Implementation Problem4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-21
- The internet changed my life3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-01-19
- The Race to Make Humans Obsolete3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-07
- YJIT: Building a New JIT Compiler Inside CRuby3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-06-02
- Turing Drawings3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-27
- /2014/01/02/tile-based-image-compression/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-12-05
- Basic Block Versioning – My Best Result Yet2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-24
- A Recursive Algorithm to Render Signed Distance Fields2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-09
- The Need for Stable Foundations in Software Development2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-22
What Hacker News says?
Another example of "they'll never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... One thought: if merely 'being a Linux user' can enrich bug report rates by a factor of 6.5x, how many bugs are still not being reported...?
Comment linking /2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/
on “Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux”Submitted The internet changed my life as a story · 578 points
HN discussionI was just reading another article on here about fractal image compression and stumbled across this: http://pointersgonewild.com/2014/01/02/tile-based-image-comp... written by this woman: https://twitter.com/Love2Code Maybe you can't generalize the opinions of two people to 50% of the human race?
Comment linking /2014/01/02/tile-based-image-compression/
on “BPG Image format”Submitted They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken as a story · 417 points
HN discussionI tried something simpler than but similar to fractal compression earlier this year. Got interesting results: http://pointersgonewild.com/2014/01/02/tile-based-image-comp...
Comment linking /2014/01/02/tile-based-image-compression/
on “BPG Image format”Submitted The Alternative Implementation Problem as a story · 272 points
HN discussionIn my experience it's the other way around - but the difference is not that big anyway. Commercial programs typically imply paid support, which can tease out more details when the user contacts them. The users themselves are also more invested, as they already committed their money. Open source software faces the same problems about a lack of bug reports. Check out this article and the related HN discussion: https:/…
Comment linking /2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/
on “Audacity may collect “Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation” and more”Submitted Zupiter: A Web-Based Modular Synthesizer as a story · 147 points
HN discussionOn the other hand, if you wait too long, you run the risk of being afflicted with the kind of Stockholm syndrome/curse of expertise that explains how bad so much of everything is. When I start playing with something, once the number of papercuts I'm tracking in my head gets above 2–3, then I crack open a fresh notes.markdown file adjacent to the source repo (if there is one) and start recording all my thoughts in th…
Comment linking /2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/
on “Rust After the Honeymoon”Submitted Replacing a Rust Enum with a 64-Bit Word Made My Interpreter 17% Faster as a story · 143 points
HN discussionI'm getting all verklempt reading this! - - - - I just want to add that Maxime is the genius who wrote Turing Drawings, one of my personal all-time favorite uses of the computer ever. https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2012/12/31/turing-drawings/ It's worth looking at the code too, IMO. It made me realize that JS could be beautiful. https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Drawings -…
Comment linking /2012/12/31/turing-drawings/
on “The internet changed my life”Submitted Minimalism in programming language design as a story · 136 points
HN discussion> I am wondering why not take an existing language like python, and compile that to bash? You'll run into the Alternative Implementation Problem https://pointersgonewild.com/2024/04/20/the-alternative-impl... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40337036 - 10 days ago, 84 comments Relevant excerpt: > You may read this and think that the key lesson of this post follows the old adage that “if you can’t beat them, join…
Comment linking /2024/04/20/the-alternative-implementation-problem/
on “Amber: Programming language compiled to Bash”Submitted NoiseCraft: Browser-Based Visual Programming Language for Sound and Music as a story · 110 points
HN discussionPSA: enable CORS[1] so people can make cross-origin requests without having to run a proxy. PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes your email address (e.g. "Alice <alice@example.org>") and not just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with you without having to click through to the original post and then hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never find out…
Comment linking /2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/
on “Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)”Submitted JavaScript is the C++ of the Web as a story · 106 points
HN discussionThank you for responding irshadshalu, I sincerely appreciate you taking the time. I agree that HN works in unpredictable ways. I don't know if you were just more lucky than I was, or if people like your app better because the UI looks better. If that's the case, it's interesting to know. This HN account is new-ish, but the original MusicToy blog post from 2012 is still around [1]. As far as Git goes, I would appreci…
Comment linking /2012/04/23/musictoy-music-made-simple/
on “Music Grid”Submitted What Killed Smalltalk? as a story · 104 points
HN discussion> in a language subset you're always encountering things you would have in the full language Exactly. I once pitched the idea of a Python subset (with a different focus, not performance like SPy), and almost every reaction was "will it support <favourite Python feature / favourite library>". For example, a new language can build its own solution for array math, or maybe that's not something its users need. OTOH many…
Comment linking /2024/04/20/the-alternative-implementation-problem/
on “SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python”Submitted ZetaVM, my new compiler project as a story · 94 points
HN discussionThey just put up with it. "They'll never tell you it's broken": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... In this case, I think most people replace their iPads before they are old enough to attend middle school, so the problem wouldn't arise.
Comment linking /2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/
on “Design of This Website (2021)”Submitted Basic Block Versioning – My Best Result Yet as a story · 75 points
HN discussionI think everyone working on this is well-aware of this problem. It's obvious that there can't be widespread adoption without self-piloting technology. The danger to passengers and people on the ground is much too great, and the burden of getting a pilot license is also too much of an obstacle for most people. There are other considerations such as requirements for frequent routine inspections on flying vehicles, whi…
Comment linking /2015/09/15/all-hope-is-not-lost-for-flying-cars/
on “Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars”Submitted The Fastest For-In Loops in the Whole Wide Web as a story · 74 points
HN discussion> when I hear "document on how to update something" I hear "untested set of manual steps" Why "untested" and why "manual"? I mentioned "detail" and "rigor" more than once and that it's possible to take it and feed it into a machine that will "perform those steps automatically". I don't think kernel+shell are all that timeless of an interface to write to. They only barely pass for being portable in the here and now.…
Comment linking /2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/
on “My stack is HTML+CSS”Submitted The End of Online Anonymity (2019) as a story · 73 points
HN discussionYou might recognize the author from https://pointersgonewild.com/
Comment linking /
on “Our Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust”Submitted The Need for Stable Foundations in Software Development as a story · 70 points
HN discussionTo get access to a wealth of libraries, support, documentation and tools, that D is sorely lacking in. To be able to use a state of the art garbage collector that provides some degree of guarantee about runtime performance as opposed to D's very poor garbage collector that provides basically no guarantees and is known to sometimes block an application for upwards of dozens of seconds at a time [1]. And most importan…
Comment linking /2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector-problem/
on “Organizations Using the D Language”Submitted Making a Simple Music Sequencer Using CSV Spreadsheets as a story · 68 points
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