271
On the nature of computing science (1984)
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
272
LSP: The good, the bad, and the ugly
For a few years now I have been working on the Haskell Language Server (HLS), and the lsp library for the LSP protocol and writing LSP servers. Unsurprisingly, I have developed some opinions about the design of the LSP! Recently I gave a talk about HLS and LSP at the Haskell Ecosystem Workshop at Zurihac 2024. One…
273
Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs
Designing a dictionary of visually unambiguous characters for IDs.
274
Lesser known parts of Python standard library
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
275
Web components are okay
Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a…
276
Serialization Is the Secret
If a value mutates in the forest with no one to see it, does it really mutate?
277
Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a messag…
278
Bus Number – The GitHub plugin my coworkers asked me not to write
This blog post was written together with <mclare> , who made coooool visualizations like the picture at the end of the post!
279
tolower() with AVX-512
A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.
280
Unusual Raku Features
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
281
Mario Maker 2 API
Mario Maker 2 API, created Thursday, February 10, 2022
282
Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ
After getting to work on some personal projects using Go+HTMX+Templ this year, I have decided to give up on using React on any personal projects. You can actually find a lot of compelling arguments for ditching React in favor of HTMX in the essays found in the HTMX official website. But I feel that not that many…
283
Understanding the design of the the Super Nintendo video system
Last time, I explored the inside of the Super Nintendo cartridges . Today I am going through its video system.
284
The web's clipboard, and how it stores data of different types
Exploring the web’s clipboard APIs, their limitations, and their history.
285
The tragedy of running an old Node project
You want it to just work. But it resists.
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287
Rewrite It in Rails
In 2022 I started building an application for creating Customs declarations. After evaluating some options and writing code in various programming languages ...
288
How do HTTP servers figure out Content-Length?
Anyone who has implemented a simple HTTP 1.1 server can tell you that it is a really simple protocol. Basically, it's a text file that has some specific rules t…
289
SQLite on Rails: The how and why of optimal performance
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
290
Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 1
I was recently made maintainer of the json gem, and aside from fixing some old bugs, I focused quite a bit on its performance, so that it is now the fastest JSON parser and generator for Ruby on most benchmarks.
291
Algorithms we develop software by
Pathfinding applied to the software solution domain
292
Safe relational database queries using the Rust type system
New database library for Rust
293
A quick post on Chen's algorithm
Update (April 19): Yilei Chen announced the discovery of a bug in the algorithm, which he does not know how to fix. This was independently discovered by Hongxun Wu and Thomas Vidick. At present, th…
294
Piccolo – A Stackless Lua Interpreter
piccolo is an interpreter for the Lua language written in pure, mostly safe Rust with an eye towards safe sandboxing and resiliency. It uses gc-arena for its garbage collection system, and in fact gc-arena was originally created as part of piccolo .
295
Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
296
Using Erlang hot code updates
One of the Erlang ecosystem's spiciest nerd snipes are hot code updates. Because it can do it. In ways that almost no other runtime can. I use Elixir which builds on Erlang and has the same capabilities.
297
The Swift compiler is slow due to how types are inferred
How a 10 year old design choice for Swift’s type checker still haunts us to this day
298
Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers
I built a Factorio belt balancer solver. From tiny 2x2 grids to a massive 16x16 monster, every step revealed new solver tricks, numeric hiccups, and devious debugging puzzles.
299
The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
300
Opening Windows in Linux with sockets, bare hands and 200 lines of C
In this post I want to create a single file C file program to open a windows inside Linux without using xlib or any similar libraries. The idea is to explore X11 protocol and see how it is used to interact with X server to create windows.