Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,828 posts.
How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2018: NLL edition
Niko Matsakis recently blogged about the Rust compiler’s new borrow checker , which implements non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). The new borrow checker is a really nice improvement to Rust, because it accepts many sound programs that the old borrow checker rejected.
How to Think About Time in Programming
A conceptual model for thinking about time in programming that encapsulates the complexity that many programmers cite online
Lean now ships with verified kernels
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language
Sometimes we have ideas that are bad but demand to enter reality. A few months ago, while chatting with a friend, we toyed around with the idea of a language where the only control flow you get is error handling. This idea embedded itself in my brain and wouldn't let me go, so I kept just talking about it until two…
A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer
Maybe I just haven't been paying attention before, but in the last year or so, there seems to have been an increase in discussion around the Nix package manager. This is also what got me to finally try it, and I'm very happy with the results, even if the road is a little bumpy.
Sketches of Elixir
Sketches of Elixir : Friends, I am now at least in this respect a rare breed: an Elixir programmer who has never written Ruby. I was never a professional Erlang programmer. I cut my teeth on Python
Impact HTML5 Game Engine released
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
Open sourcing the Firebase SDKs
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
How we use Rust in our mobile SDK
In this post, we'll discuss some specifics of how we use Rust to power our mobile frameworks for iOS and Android.
24 Hours of Rust Game Development
In this post I'll talk about a small game I've been developing in about 24 hours in total (mostly in a few hour blocks during evenings or…
Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence (2013)
I’m going to talk today about what goes on in inside developers’ heads when they make estimates, why that’s so hard to fix, and how I personally figured out how to live and write software (for very happy business owners) even though my estimates are just as brutally unreliable as ever.
I discovered a critical exploit in ZeroMQ with mostly pure luck
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
My Problem with the Four-Document Model
Two universal facts about user documentation: Documentation is really important. We are really bad at writing it. We don’t have good theories on what makes for useful documentation. That is except for the four document model, or Diátaxis.1 I’m glad that people use it. I’m also a little frustrated that people use it…
Run end-to-end tests faster with Firecracker
Firecracker is the technology which powers Serverless, but it can be also be repurposed to run end-to-end tests quickly and cheaply.
Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
From the Zed Blog: A detailed exploration of Zed's eventually-consistent text representation.
The Tiniest GIF Ever
Yesterday I was base64-encoding an image so I could send it to CouchDB to test some code I’m working on for a client. It reminded me of something I did a while back to set cookies on a remote server.
Searching for DeepSeek's glitch tokens
A first attempt at identifying and cataloging DeepSeek's glitched tokens
The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
Interruptions, recovery time, and task size: three numbers that determine if you'll get real work done. Interactive visualizations show the math behind bad days.
Welp, there go my Git signatures
Hello! If you already know about the RoCA vulnerability, and you know what I did about it (or you don’t care), then feel free to skip down to the good stuff! Signs of Trouble Monday morning,…
Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
While the modern programming language Haxe is well-known in some circles, many developers have never heard of it. Yet since it first appeared in 2005, it's been battle-tested by its loyal---if rather quiet---following. It boasts a pragmatic and mature combination of features for development in business, gaming, and ...
The depth and breadth of Python
As of late I'm noticing a trend: I'm spending more time having in-person in-depth conversations, and less time coding. While I regret the la...
Compilers for free with weval
With some partial evaluation and specialization hints, it is possible to get pretty decent speedups on interpreters by turning them into compilers.
Smarter Training of Neural Networks
These days, nearly all the artificial intelligence-based products in our lives rely on “deep neural networks” that automatically learn to process labeled data.
How to make Firefox builds 17% faster
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code
Lately, there has been a lot of experimentation with very short programs that synthesize something that sounds like music. I now want to sha...