Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,537 posts.
On Friday, we migrated Soundslice from Heroku to direct use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) . I'm very, very happy with this change and want to spread the word about how we did it and why you should consider it if you're in a similar position.
Recently the team I work with completed a project to allow Shopify to run in multiple datacenters . This project was a refactoring project in disguise. When you undertake large refactoring of a code-base with 100s of developers and 100,000s of lines of code, you can’t align by sending an email. The merge-conflicts a…
A talk at Hydra distributed computing conference , online (originally planned to be in Moscow, Russia), 06 Jul 2020
In this essay, we are going to look at recursive algorithms, and how sometimes, we can organize an algorithm so that it resembles the data structure it manipulates, and organize a data structure so that it resembles the algorithms that manipulate it.
7 databases to explore in 2025.
A list of Python tips and tricks. See how many of them you already know.
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
-- "Have you ever detected anyone trying to add a backdoor to curl?" -- "Have you ever been pressured by an organization or a person to add suspicious code to curl that you wouldn't otherwise accept?" -- "If a crime syndicate would kidnap your family to force you to comply, what backdoor would you be … Continue…
tldr; you can do jobs, queues, real time change feeds, time series, object store, document store, full text search with PostgreSQL. How to,...
2021-11-13 page moved to http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html
Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right.
Best practices and principles to create accurate and reliable software based financial systems.
A guide on how to compile the X Window System for iOS
To hear some people talk about functional programming, you’d think they’d joined some kind of cult. They prattle on about how it’s changed the way they think about code. They’ll extol the benefits of purity, at length. And proclaim that they are now able to “reason about their code”—as if all other code is irrational…
It's common for me to get excited about a personal project, put a bunch of time into it, and then lose interest. As much as possible, I want these projects to continue working; upkeep isn't fun. What does designing for minimum maintenance look like? The biggest piece is minimizing your dependencies, and limiting them…
Interactive mini-book on concurrent programming in Go.
Sharing my thoughts on userscripts, a phenomenon the swept the internet back in the 00s.
This post has everything you need to know about xargs , an essential tool for shell programming . It's based on my # comments on this "wrong" post:
All I can say is “wow”! The response to Light Table has been far more positive and far greater than I could’ve imagined. To put it into perspective, here are some aggregated numbers at the time of this writing:
We'll explain the concepts underlying LLVM IR, and how you can use the LLVM C++ API in your programming language's compiler.
Exploring the chardet v7.0.0 controversy: Can an AI rewrite legally 'launder' a library from LGPL to MIT?
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
