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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.

Software Engineering
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3275

My First Impressions of Nix

Nix is a tool for configuring software environments according to source files. I’ve been hearing more and more about Nix on Hacker News and Twitter. The idea of it appeals to me, so I’ve been tinkering with it over the past few weeks. My history with infrastructure as code Ten years ago, I discovered Salt, a tool that…

3279

Update on await syntax in Rust

In my previous post I said that the lang team would be making our final decision about the syntax of the await operator in the May 23 meeting. That was last Thursday, and we did reach a decision. In brief, we decided to go forward with the preliminary proposal I outlined earlier: a postfix dot syntax, future.await…

3281

tolower() with AVX-512

A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.

3283

Reverse geocoding is hard

My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a…

3287

JS things I didn’t know existed

I was reading through the MDN docs the other day and found these JS features and APIs I never knew existed. So here is a short list of those things, useful or not - learning JS seemingly never ends. Label Statements [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/