Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,819 posts.

Software Engineering
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3821

How does rsync work?

This post is the third article in a series of blog posts about rsync, see the Series Overview. With rsync up and running, it’s time to take a peek under the hood of rsync to better understand how it works. How does rsync work? When talking about the rsync protocol, we need to distinguish between:

3822

I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

In this article, I will tell how I contributed code to Mozilla during a Bug Squashing Party. I hope to provide some tips and advice about how to start contributing to a Mozilla project (or any other open-source project). I will talk about Firefox and Servo, which, I think, are somehow representative of two common ways…

3829

Go 1.20 released

The latest Go release, version 1.20, arrives six months after Go 1.19 . Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility . We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.

3835

A 100x speedup with unsafe Python

We're going to speed up some numpy code by 100x using "unsafe Python." Which is not quite the same as unsafe Rust, but it's a bit similar, and I'm not sure what else to call it... you'll see. It's not something you'd use in most Python code, but it's handy on occasion, and I think it shows "the nature of Python” from…

3838

A Real Life Off-by-One Error

The Championnats d’Europe d’Escalade (climbing) in Villars-sur-Ollon has just finished. I couldn’t make it to all the events, but did see the finals of the “Speed” event. It’s a series of head-to-head elimination races up a 15m tall wall, resulting in an eventual victor after enough rounds.