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Coders Notes

codersnotes.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2011

Coders Notes is a programmer's personal blog on game development, low-level code, compression, operating systems and computing history.

What HN saysCommenters recommend his TempleOS essay and his explanation of Deflate, which one calls an elegant pairing of two algorithms.
80HN people shared it
44linked it in comments
60stories submitted
3.5Kstory points
4 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    A Constructive Look at TempleOS
    37 people · 945 points · first shared 2015 · 169 comments on HN
  2. 2
    How to Write a Maths Library in 2016
    5 people · 29 points · first shared 2016 · 3 comments on HN
  3. 3
    What Was the Microsoft Network?
    4 people · 494 points · first shared 2018 · 152 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Disassembling Jak and Daxter
    4 people · 333 points · first shared 2017 · 32 comments on HN
  5. 5
    The Elegance of Deflate
    4 people · 252 points · first shared 2016 · 82 comments on HN
  6. 6
  7. 7
    The Death of the Von Neumann Architecture
    3 people · 110 points · first shared 2015 · 75 comments on HN
  8. 8
    Under Construction (2015)
    3 people · 74 points · first shared 2015 · 39 comments on HN
  9. 9
    Learning via Bullshit
    3 people · 8 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
    Ill-Advised C++ Rant, Part 2
    2 people · 126 points · first shared 2016 · 73 comments on HN
  11. 11
    Something Rotten in the Core
    2 people · 86 points · first shared 2017 · 19 comments on HN
  12. 12
    The Multi-Project Programmer
    2 people · 8 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
  13. 13
    Debunking Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Tech
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    Sleepy
    2 people · first shared 2011
  15. 15
    The Secret Button
    1 people · 241 points · first shared 2016 · 117 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

kayamon · 2022-06-10
I write on my own website, where I scream into the wind endlessly like an elderly person shaking his fist angrily at passing clouds. I don't believe anyone reads any of it but I find it helps me get my thoughts in order. It's hosted on DreamHost. It's all custom, I glued it together with Markdown, CSS, and a little Python. I've been with them for years and I can still recommend them. I'm not sure the exact location matters though. Success comes not from the venue but bringing an audience. Also the key to successful self-promotion is to spam your own stuff tirelessly until the heat death of the universe, so here we go: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/why-build/
hazn · 2021-01-15
This great article on TempleOS has the same comparision to Oberon: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ HN discussion of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9681501
nathell · 2020-05-08
Also well worth reading: A constructive look on TempleOS http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
nonsince · 2019-04-24
To add another existing implementation of this, Naughty Dog's Lisp-based assembler could do hot code reloading, and that workflow was extensively used for developing Jak & Daxter. Plus, obviously any JIT'd language can do this but it's fair not to count that. Still, that's just splitting hairs and it's really exciting to see this in Nim. It's a great language and it's a shame that it doesn't seem to have found a real niche yet. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/disassembling-jak/
abuckenheimer · 2018-10-17
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 choose either, and yet represent them using the same language. No extra markers, nothing to say "oh, now we're switching to entropy mode", nothing to get in the way.
mrspeaker · 2016-02-03
I've been wanting this feature ever since I watched a video of TempleOS, which featured images in source code (everything is in "DolDoc" format: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/). I'd love to be able to drop in diagrams, screen shots, and scribbles into the source code of my personal projects!
jitl · 2017-10-26
It seems like commenters here on HN are caught on the point that GDB does provide a reasonable machine interface. That's not the author's point; responding specifically to that fact is missing the forest for one mis-labeled non-tree. Here's two paragraphs from later on that sum much better: > We've seen it hundreds of times in all kinds of software. Functions that return bool instead of an error code. Where did the precise error vanish to? Poof, it's gone! What used to be a useful error message became false, and if you're lucky you'll get a generic "Unexpected error" appearing on screen. And that's if your program is using a library. If it's calling out to a command-line worker, the most likely case is it won't get checked at all and will just get printed out into a log file you'll never find, and then never seen again. > (image) Homer's typing bird: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/something-rotten-in-the-core/pecking.… > We're making systems that are fragile, because they're just glued on rather than bolted together. We're wrapping complex things up a wrappers that don't take the same responsibilities as the things they rely on. Like Homer's pecking bird in the Simpsons, they work just fine when everything is as expected, but when the slightest change in situation happens then everything breaks. I think the article is worth reading in full.
maximilianburke · 2013-01-28
I've spent the last seven years working on video game middleware and have had plenty of experience to many development environments. I've spent years developing for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, and worked on every console that has been available on the market in that time. GDB is different, but it's different in a bad way. Jonathan is completely correct in that it's a much worse experience because it doesn't easily give you the information you need to consume in order to find the problem you're looking to solve. Using the text user interface helps considerably but it still gets in the way. Sure, seeing source is fine, but what if you want disassembly too? Mixed source/assembly? Register view? Watches? Switching between threads easily? Viewing memory? DDD is an improvement but it still feels like it's 8 years behind. I'm glad to hear you're productive in that environment, most people (especially most game developers) aren't, and based on my experience getting people up to speed and fixing problems it's easier to get them going on Windows than on Linux. That said, it's not the worst though. Green Hills takes that crown by a country mile. The SN Systems debugger for PS3 is the best one I've used, bar none. It gives you all the data you need, is responsive, and has a few really nice features (write memory region to disk). Not quite sure why you used gcc for PS3, SNC is far superior. It's faster at compiling and generates both faster and smaller code. Both sed and grep are…
29athrowaway · 2024-07-23
Please check this out http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ Jump to the section titled "HyperText" (DolDoc)
easyThrowaway · 2023-07-26
Quite frankly, the W3C stopped having any say on the matter when the WHATWG supplanted the XHTML standard with the HTML5 committee. They had enough weight at the time to say "The Web is XHTML2, you can make your own internet if you want " compared to what they can bargain for these days. Maybe at the time it was a somewhat reasonable decision to abdicate their responsibility over to big internet companies, but that's what brought us to the current state where we're basically going back to original version of The Microsoft Network[1]. [1]http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/
classichasclass · 2022-08-21
TempleOS works like that. You can just call functions directly in any program. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
bobbylarrybobby · 2021-06-29
Anytime I think about how everything is plain text, I m reminded of TempleOS (http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/), an operating system written by a schizophrenic man according to God's instruction. The fact that one guy built a system where everything is written in hypertext (yes, you can embed images in source files -- why not?), where *nix systems would use plaintext, shows just how far behind the FOSS world is.
stunami · 2020-09-15
Somewhat reminded me of the constructive look at TempleOS http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
salgernon · 2020-06-02
There 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-templeos/
pistachiopro · 2018-11-01
Color 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 out your artist's intuitive tonemapping function). Here's a fun article which explores the idea a bit more: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/untonemapping/
wolfgke · 2018-09-06
Another article that centers not around the person, but TempleOS: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
NuSkooler · 2018-09-01
There's a fairly interesting write up on TempleOS here: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
rayiner · 2018-08-29
God I miss this: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/msn1_02.jpg#rig… 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.
partycoder · 2017-12-04
TempleOS has many interesting features, but remember that TempleOS is rather different at a very fundamental level. Meaning, both kernel and userland run on a privileged ring, the file system has no permissions, etc. This is not a flaw but it is rather by design. This is a paradigm that might be incompatible to that of Linux. However, I think there is potential for porting things. Some good articles about Temple OS are: - http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ - https://www.jwhitham.org/2015/07/porting-third-party-programs-to-templ…
greenyoda · 2017-10-31
The URL was pasted in twice. The correct URL is: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/elegance-of-deflate/ Looks like an interesting article. The original poster may want to re-submit with the correct URL.
bykovich · 2017-04-24
Doesn't look like it, but it's besides (and in fact probably counter) to the point of the OS. Seriously, read that "Constructive Look at TempleOS" chx posted: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
tdeck · 2017-03-24
Incidentally, 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-templeos/
douche · 2017-03-11
There's open-sourced source code available for two of those. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-man-behind-the-curtain/
saycheese · 2016-12-07
Review of TempleOS, its developer and their history with HN are covered: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/

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