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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
During my internship at Jane Street 1 , one of my projects was a config editing tool that at first sounded straightforward but culminated in me designing a custom tree diffing algorithm using dynamic programming, relentlessly optimizing it and then transforming it into an A* accelerated path finding algorithm. This…
Just over 2 years ago Microsoft open-sourced the entire .NET framework, this posts attempts to provide a ‘Hitchhikers Guide’ to the source-code found in the CoreCLR GitHub repository.
I sometimes get asked for recommendations of what programming language to "learn next". It's great that folks appreciate the fact that being exposed to several sufficiently different programming languages is an important step on the path to programming enlightenment. But it's also true that, given limited free time…
Mistakes and lessons from a real-world feature performance optimizations: from API usage to advanced data structures, from bit hacks to CPU-friendlier code.
Revisiting some opinions on how to pick a microcontroller - as a followup to SnapEDA's post on the Top 10 Microcontrollers on their site.
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I wasn't going to write this post because I've already said most of what I wanted to on Twitter [http://twitter.com/steve228uk]. Yesterday though, I changed my mind when I saw this Tweet from Product Hunt. > The Best Podcast Apps for Mac 🎙️🖥️ Add your favorite 👉 https://t.
For music encoding Opus has already been shown to out-perform other audio codecs at both 64 kb/s and 96 kb/s . We originally thought that 64 kb/s was near the lowest bitrate at which Opus could be useful for streaming stereo music. However, with variable bitrate (VBR) improvements in Opus 1.1, suddenly 48 kb/s became…
OpenAI Universe was very exciting when it first came out. With Universe, it was suddenly possible to train AI to play Flash games, book flights online, and perform various other real-world tasks. Unfortunately, Universe never really took off in the AI world. I don’t know why others aren’t using Universe, but I can…
Being involved in open source software is rewarding, yeah? You start off contributing to your favorite project, and it feels so heartwarming when that project’s maintainers recognize your effort. Then a few years later you somehow end up responsible for that project, and maybe some satellite projects, and people are…
What are threads? Every modern operating system has support for threads, and most programming environments provide some level of support for...
Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations. In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems, taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Z
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Complex queries are hard to read. Literate SQL is about writing queries that are as easy to read as a good novel.
‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Today we’re relicensing the GraphQL specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) v1.0. We think the OWFa is a great fit for…
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
Can you see the resemblance?
The other day Steve wanted git alchemy done on the Rust repo. Specifically, he wanted the reference and nomicon moved out into their own repositories …
There are many ways to evaluate a developer. Should we use quantitative metrics or stick to qualitative ones?
Smaller files are downloaded faster, so making an asset file size smaller before sending it to a client is a good thing to do.
A little while ago I wrote about 16bitjs, a 16 bit virtual machine written in javascript. It implemented a custom CPU architecture and assembly language, assembler, and debugger. I had the thought …
In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication. We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we…
