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How UTF-8 Works
If you're anything like me, you love emojis! Emojis appear like an image on the screen, but they aren't an image like a PNG or JPEG. What do emojis look like to computers? 

0x820x820x980...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,538 posts.
1862
What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?
Dive deep into the open-source architecture of Lichess.org to understand the technical processes behind making a move in a game.
1863
Fast, Safe, and Complete(ish) Web Service in Rust
A detailed look at the frameworks, concurrency model, error handling, middleware constructs, and testing strategies of a web service written in Rust.
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BMW Connected Apps Protocol
Stories about my nerd projects
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Biggest image in the smallest space
What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…
1867
HTML Lists
This second installment in the "You don't know HTML" series is going to be all about the ways that we put collections of things together
1868
What's in a Linux Executable?
Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed somet...
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Why Use Make
I love Make . You may think of Make as merely a tool for building large binaries or libraries (and it is, almost to a fault), but it’s much more than that. Makefiles are machine-readable documentation that make your workflow reproducible.
1871
How to effectively write quality code with AI
AI is rarely optional anymore, but how can you still be proud of your craft? Discover the workflow to effectively write high-quality, robust code using AI tools.
1872
A Tour of the Lisps
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
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Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs
After 15 years as a software engineer, I realized I had never actually built and published a game.
1874
Prompt engineering vs. blind prompting
"Prompt Engineering" emerged from the growth of language models to describe the process of applying prompting to effectively extract information from language models, typically for use in real-world applications.
1875
Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell
For work-related reasons, I had to recently get up to speed on programming in Haskell. Before that, I had very little actual experience with the language, clocking probably at less than a thousand lines of working code over a couple of years. Nothing impressive either: some wrapper script here, some experimental…
1876
The 9 lines of code that Google allegedly stole from Oracle
After reading about the Oracle v. Google trial I looked up the famous 9 lines of code that Google allegedly stole from Oracle, which implement the rangeCheck method for arrays. Note that arrays and…
1877
Meta's new LLM-based test generator
Meta's TestGen-LLM is a sneak peek to the future of developer productivity: specialized, orchestrated, and rigorously filtered.
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Translating math into code with examples in Java, Racket, Haskell, Python (2011)
These structures are so universal that most research papers in the theory of computation, programming languages and formal methods present concepts in terms of discrete mathematics rather than code.
1880
To close or not to close – Void HTML elements
A blog about web and frontend development, design, 3d and music — by Mat Simon.
1881
Running Awk in parallel to process 256M records
TL;DR Awk crunches massive data; a High Performance Computing (HPC) script calls hundreds of Awk concurrently. Fast and scalable in-memory solution on a fat machine.
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Copilot Internals
Hacky repo to see what the Copilot extension sends to the server
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Generating sudokus for fun and no profit
A guide on how to generate sudokus of any difficulty.
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Bad NEWS, Emacs
Post by Eshel Yaron about changes for the worse in Emacs 30 registers feature
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The worst API ever made (2014)
A call-by-call look at context switch logging with the Event Tracing for Windows API.
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PDF to Text, a challenging problem
The search engine has recently gained the ability to index the PDF file format. The change will deploy over a few months. Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format. It…