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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 7,298 posts.
Language is made of discrete structures, yet neural networks operate on continuous data: vectors in high-dimensional space. A successful language-processing network must translate this symbolic information into some kind of geometric representation—but in what form? Word embeddings provide two well-known examples…
For decades, memory safety vulnerabilities have been at the center of various security incidents across the industry, eroding trust in technology and costing billions. T…
The critical section may be an old dog, but it's still learning new tricks.
After a first experience with ReasonML, I wanted to check if its parent language, OCaml, was also that good. It took me an entire game to form a clear opinion.
When the subject of Java modules comes up in online discussions every so often, I get the sense that many people misunderstand what it is that modules are supposed to do. That's understandable, as the name 'modules' does not evoke the precise purpose of the feature. There are many kinds of modules, even in the Java…
This paper from Zhu and Godfrey looks at single-statement bug fixes in Java code: more specifically, at the differences between how bug are fixed by the people who created them and how they are fixed by other people. The authors found that people fix their own bugs more quickly than other people's, which falls under…
The SQL language is a "standard". Even so, no two SQL database engines work exactly alike. Every SQL implementation has its own peculiarities and oddities, and SQLite is no exception to this rule.
Since its inception, Whereoscope has been an iPhone-only shop. The genesis of this iPhone-fetishism goes all the way back to the very first iPhone: in a way, it was the potential that device tantal…
V8’s Math.random implementation now uses an algorithm called xorshift128+, improving the randomness compared to the old MWC1616 implementation.
Two-Factored Authentication (2FA) is now enforced for maintainers of the top-500 packages, by dependents, on the npm registry. To learn more about configuring 2FA, see Configuring two-factor authentication. To learn…
Something that often, uh... bugs Go developers is the lack of a proper debugger. Builds are ridiculously fast and easy, but sometimes it would be nice to just set a breakpoint and step through that endless if chain or print a bunch of values without recompiling ten times.
This update mostly focuses on further bugfixes over actually implementing new stuff, but we have quite a bunch of both!
How you can use metaprogramming in Python and how it can simplify certain tasks.
Access technologies from partnerships with the community and leaders. Everything open source at Intel. We have a lot to share and a lot to learn.
Solid Queue is Rails’ default background job backend: jobs live in your database, no Redis. See how jobs, workers, and the supervisor work under the hood.
mod_wasm is a new module to run WebAssembly (Wasm) modules in Apache httpd
After a long journey (1.5 years..oh my) we have released JRuby 1.7.0. The JRuby 1.7 release series represents a tremendous amount of work by dozens of contributors, and there are improvements in every subsystem. Users of highly-concurrent applications will see improvements in throughput and raw parallelism. And JRuby…
The .NET team at Microsoft has been working in close collaboration with the gRPC team since November 2018 on a new fully managed implementation of gRPC for .NET Core. We’re pleased to announce that grpc-dotnet is now available with .NET Core 3.0 today! How to get it? grpc-dotnet packages have just been released to…
C++ provides two calling syntaxes, x.f(y) and f(x,y). This has bothered me for a long time. I discussed the problem in the context of multimethods in D&E in 1994, referring back to a proposal by Doug Lea from 1991, and again in 2007. Each of the syntaxes has its virtues, but they force design decisions on people…
`varchar(191)` is such an odd number - how did we get here?
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