331
Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?
Traditionally C++ has been seen by many (and you know who you are) as just plain bad: the code is unreadably verbose, error messages are und...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,508 posts.
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Porn, Zen, and .vimrc
Vim is a customizable text editor geared towards writing code. But open-ended configuration possibilities lure users into wasting time while chasing after perceived minute gains in productivity. This article describes my Vim journey, starting from heavy personal customization and ending with a renewed love for…
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Nim 1.4
We are very proud to announce Nim version 1.4 after six months of continuous development! Other than version 1.0, this is probably the biggest Nim release yet and we’re very excited to release it!
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What if we had Local-First Software?
The path to an offline SaaS model
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SpaCy v3.0 Nightly
spaCy v3.0 is a huge release! It features new transformer-based pipelines that get spaCy's accuracy right up to the current state-of-the-art, and a new workflow system to help you take projects from prototype to production. It's much easier to configure and train your pipeline, and there are lots of new and improved…
336
Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync
I am a big fan of my Kindle. This is the device I’d bring over to a desert island. I am also a fairly frequent user of the highlight feature where you can select a bit of text you like and save it. One thing is bothering me though: the lack of open API on the Kindle to retrieve the data about me. Amazon provides the…
337
Introduction to ARC/ORC in Nim
Nim is advancing towards more efficient memory management models. Let's talk about ARC/ORC and see how they will change the way memory works in Nim.
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LDM: My Favorite ARM Instruction
LDM—or load multiple —is my favorite assembly instruction of the ARM instruction set. Here’s why.
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Unifying the Technical Interview
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
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Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
The Snap! Community. Snap! is a blocks-based programming language built by UC Berkeley and used by hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world.
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Pg_stat_monitor – better insights into query performance in PostgreSQL
Percona has developed a new pg_stat_monitor plugin for PostgreSQL which captures all the details in order to provide deep query performance insights.
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Dockerfile Security Best Practices
Quickly improve the security of your docker containers by following security best practices in the Dockerfile
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PEP 638 – Syntactic Macros
This PEP adds support for syntactic macros to Python. A macro is a compile-time function that transforms a part of the program to allow functionality that cannot be expressed cleanly in normal library code.
344
Prefer Fakes over Mocks
The primary purpose of software testing is to detect any potential defects in a program before it reaches its intended consumers. This is typically achieved by establishing functional requirements which define supported user interactions as well as…
345
14,000x Speedup (2015)
In my job as a scientific software developer, I tend to write a lot of code. And most people who haven’t been through a Computer Science degree tend to think that CS is “just” about slinging code at the screen and then running it. I have a good working relationship with many of my colleagues and co-workers with other…
346
Applying Textbook Data Structures for Real Life Wins
How we leveraged a textbook data structure in our core platform and achieved a 15x speed up for a key data processing step.
347
Towards Tactic Metaprogramming in Haskell
Isn’t it weird that we treat source code as text? That is, we have this extremely well-structured and strongly-typed object — the abstract syntax tree — that exists conceptually in our minds, and in actuality inside of our compiler, but for some reason we pretend it’s just a pile of bytes and edit it byte-by-byte…
348
I Tried to Reduce Pylint Memory Usage
Through work I have to deal with a pretty huge codebase, and run Pylint on it during our continuous integration process. It's always been a bit slow, but recently I also noticed that it was consuming a lot of memory, causing OOM failures if we tried to run it too much in parallel.
349
PyOxidizer 0.8
I am very excited to announce the 0.8 release of PyOxidizer , a modern Python application packaging tool. You can find the full changelog in the docs . First time user? See the Getting Started documentation.
350
Basic Concepts in Unity for Software Engineers
Unity game development guide for software engineers. Start from first principles with scenes, game objects, components, and serialization.
351
Rust After the Honeymoon
Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust . Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is…
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Creating a Slack app that uses fewer resources
I recently created a macOS app called Slack Lite, which beats Slack's desktop app across a few performance metrics. Slack Lite uses Slack's official UI, so it's visually indistinguishable from the official client. Even so, Slack Lite uses 5x fewer threads, 3.5x less time to startup, and significantly less CPU. In the…
354
Webpack 5
webpack is a module bundler for JavaScript, CSS, HTML, WebAssembly and assets. It builds a dependency graph from your project and emits optimized bundles for browsers, Node.js, Deno, Bun and other environments.
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A New Back End for Cranelift
This post will describe my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I’ll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we’ve been working on.
357
Reversing the technical interview (2017)
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
358
A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival
A short story about SQL's better rival: Michael Stonebraker's storied query language, QUEL.
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Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet
tldr: work has started to make Hyper work as a backend in curl for HTTP. curl and its data transfer core, libcurl, is all written in C. The language C is known and infamous for not being memory safe and for being easy to mess up and as a result accidentally cause security problems. At … Continue reading rust in curl…
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Bash Error Handling
Here's a preview from my zine, Bite Size Bash ! If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics !