Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,842 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
16626

Finding Goroutine Bugs with TLA+

My job these days is teaching TLA+ and formal methods: specifying designs to find bugs in them. But just knowing the syntax isn’t enough to write specs, and it helps to have examples to draw from. I recently read Chris Siebenmann’s Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy and thought it would make a good case study…

16629

Who invented vector clocks?

Back in spring 2020, I was wrapping up the distributed systems course I was teaching, and for the last lecture, decided to spend a little time poking at the question of who actually invented vector clocks. Most people who need something to cite for vector clocks cite Friedemann Mattern’s “Virtual Time and Global…

16636

The Grammar of Vim

Like a lot of people, I have gone retro when it comes to editors, using Vim for most of my day to day work. I’ve been doing most of my development these days in a terminal window, logged directly into a VM where I test my code. For more, see this article. I have been a somewhat casual vi user for at least 15 years…

16642

Java’s Mysterious Interrupt

One of the lesser known parts of Java is InterruptedException. With its vague-sounding name and non-committal Javadoc, few people are able to figure out what they need to do with it. Since I myself didn’t really grok it, I decided to put together a post explaining how interruption works. If you are looking for a more…

16643

Lisp moving Forth moving Lisp

This chapter is a culmination of many macro techniques we have looked at so far in this book. Using macro abstractions we have developed, we create an implementation of one of my favourite programming languages: forth . Although this implementation embodies most of the important ideas of forth, it is very different…

16648

Iterating on Testing in Rust

With the release of rust 1.70, there was some surprise and frustration that unstable test features now require nightly , like all other unstable features in Rust. One of the features most affected is --format json which has been in limbo for 5 years . This drew attention to a feeling I've had: the testing story in…