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codersnotes.com
Personal blog · codersnotes.comprogrammingsystems
codersnotes.com is a personal blog at codersnotes.com about programming and systems. Since 2011, 80 different Hacker News readers have linked it 113 times, most often “A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015)”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015)32 people · 35 mentions · first linked 2016-02-03
- How to Write a Maths Library in 20165 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-02-20
- Disassembling Jak and Daxter4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-01-12
- What Was the Microsoft Network?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-08-29
- The Elegance of Deflate4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-08-22
- Under Construction (2015)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-11-25
- Learning via Bullshit3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-12-08
- The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-02-01
- A Constructive Look at TempleOS3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-08
- Something Rotten in the Core2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-25
What Hacker News says?
I loved this article on the elegance of deflate http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/elegance-of-deflate/ finishes with this: It's not one algorithm but two, that dance and weave together in harmony. You can pick dictionary matching, or entropy coding, and you can select between them on a per-byte basis with no overhead. That's what I find so clever about it - not that it can do one thing or the other, but that it can c…
Comment linking /notes/elegance-of-deflate/
on “Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?”Submitted A Constructive Look at TempleOS as a story · 463 points
HN discussionAnother article that centers not around the person, but TempleOS: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Comment linking /notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
on “Terry Davis has died”Submitted What Was the Microsoft Network? as a story · 314 points
HN discussionColor transitions are hard, and that illusion is pretty trippy. Beyond that, my sense is another big problem most people run into when they try to light pixel art (or any hand-painted asset) is that the asset is almost always "pre-tonemapped" by the artist. By first inverse-tonemapping the asset before applying any lighting, and then re-tonemapping afterwards, you can get pretty good results (assuming you can work o…
Comment linking /notes/untonemapping/
on “Graveyard Keeper: How the graphics effects are made”Submitted A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015) as a story · 287 points
HN discussionThere are a lot "See also" - so I'd like to shout out to the late Terry Davis' "TempleOS" and his ... strange take on an interactive boot-to-command line system based on C++ and x86_64. [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS [Edit]: See also http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Comment linking /notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
on “Snakeware – Linux distro with Python userspace inspired by Commodore 64”Submitted The Elegance of Deflate as a story · 251 points
HN discussionThe weird TempleOS has similar features: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Comment linking /notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos
on “Project Oberon”Submitted The Secret Button as a story · 241 points
HN discussion- Temple OS. Very simple OS but has interesting innovations. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp... - Amiga OS / Morph OS - Menuet OS / Kolibri OS. minimalistic and 100% written in Assembly.
Comment linking /notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
on “The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]”Submitted Disassembling Jak and Daxter as a story · 180 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of snippets posted over the years on various forums. Nothing much, a few pages to get a hint of the syntax and the basics. Once you've picked apart the loader/runtime[1] the dynamic nature of the Lisp runtime system allows the system itself to hint a lot at how things originally went together. (e.g. type information is always present, state machines are explicit and easy to spot) [1] http://www.codersn…
Comment linking /notes/disassembling-jak/
on “OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog”Submitted What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018) as a story · 177 points
HN discussionSomewhat reminded me of the constructive look at TempleOS http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Comment linking /notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
on “Project Oberon”Submitted The Metaprogrammer as a story · 176 points
HN discussionIncidentally, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the "crank" operating system Temple OS, every program in the language is written in a variant of C that's compiled on the fly, and the shell itself is just a C REPL. I've never used it but found this article very interesting: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Comment linking /notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
on “Lisp Quickstart”Submitted Being Sneaky in C as a story · 158 points
HN discussionAlas, while researching this[1] article I discovered that there are no active WebRings still in operation. (the few sites that claim to be working webrings are in fact fake) [1] http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/
Comment linking /notes/under-construction/
on “ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit”Submitted Disassembling Jak and Daxter (2017) as a story · 153 points
HN discussionI'll post up my complete entry in case anyone's interested to look through it: http://www.codersnotes.com/files/piupiu.zip See surveil.txt for notes first. Someone below asked what makes this different from the Obfuscated C contest. In this contest, the idea is to make code that looks very clean and innocent. Entries that hide their behavior in weird ugly macros or just general C complexity are not really in the spi…
Comment linking /files/piupiu.zip
on “Winners of the 7th Underhanded C Contest”Submitted Beating the Compiler as a story · 140 points
HN discussionOP here. I also wrote an article on the delights of things being Under Construction. :) http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/
Comment linking /notes/under-construction/
on “What Was the Microsoft Network?”Submitted The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases as a story · 137 points
HN discussionGod I miss this: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/msn1_... . So clear! So easy to read! So obvious what things you can click and what things you can't. Compared to this Windows Modern crap where it's not clear what's a button and what's a label, and every app (or part thereof) has its own idea about where things go.
Comment linking /notes/the-microsoft-network/msn1_02.jpg
on “What Was the Microsoft Network?”Submitted A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015) as a story · 130 points
HN discussion> MSVC compiler doesn't do SROA, as far as I know. Yes, it has since at least 2010 (and probably earlier). See "scalar replacement": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2009/11/02/visual-c-... > Have you actually looked at that thing? It's not a Point struct, I can tell you that. There's nothing abstract about it. The Vec classes can be used as Point structs. > If you want to take advantage of SIMD fully, you ne…
Comment linking /notes/maths-lib-2016/
on “The Rusty Web: Targeting the Web with Rust”Submitted The Death of the Von Neumann Architecture as a story · 105 points
HN discussion> "Expands to the exact same code everywhere on every imaginable compiler, even toy compilers nobody uses" is not part of the definition of "abstraction". MSVC compiler doesn't do SROA, as far as I know. > What do you think http://www.agner.org/optimize/#vectorclass is then? Have you actually looked at that thing? It's not a Point struct, I can tell you that. There's nothing abstract about it. If you want to take ad…
Comment linking /notes/maths-lib-2016/
on “The Rusty Web: Targeting the Web with Rust”Submitted Why Command and Vector Processors Rock as a story · 89 points
HN discussion
