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Scheduling in React
In modern applications, user interfaces often have to juggle multiple tasks at the same time. For example, a search component might need to…
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
302
Lvalues, rvalues, glvalues, prvalues, xvalues, help (2018)
Did you use to have some sort of intuition for what “lvalue” and “rvalue” meant? Are you confused about glvalues, xvalues and prvalues, and worry that lvalues and rvalues mi…
303
Fast Way to Load Data into PostgreSQL Using Python
From two minutes to less than half a second!
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Mistakes we made adopting event sourcing and how we recovered
Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement. — Fred Brooks
305
JavaScript Is C
JavaScript and C both make you maintain your invariants the most painful way possible. Happily, there are better alternatives these days.
306
How I made a website with Svelte
Just like last year, I made a list of the best media I enjoyed over the year. This includes music, films, series and games.
307
When TCP sockets refuse to die
While working on our Spectrum server , we noticed something weird: the TCP sockets which we thought should have been closed were lingering around. We realized we don't really understand when TCP sockets are supposed to time out!
308
Algebraic Data Types: Things I wish someone had explained about FP
Algebraic data types and algebraic data structures sound similar. It’s like they ought to be the same thing. But they’re not. They both have ‘algebraic’ in the name, so it’s confusing. I got them mixed up at times. Others have too. But, they’re different concepts. Understanding the difference will help if you’re…
309
Logical fallacies in software engineering
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
310
To ORM or Not to ORM
I've been enjoying using Go's database/sql package for working with databases. Recently, some mentions of gorm piqued my curiosity about using ORMs in Go vs. using database/sql directly. Having had some mixed experiences with ORMs in the past, I decided to start with a practical experiment by writing the same simple…
311
“What Alan Kay Got Wrong About Objects”
One of the anonymous reviewers of my recently published Storage Combinators paper ( pdf ) complained that hiding disk-based, remote, and lo...
312
A bug I wish I hadn't caught
When I catch a bug before release I’m usually glad, because I’ve narrowly averted ruining someone’s experience or eating their data. Today I found a bug that I wish I hadn’t caught, a bug that I wish I’d released into the wild to witness in its full glory. I found this bug in my digital card game Ring of Worlds, and…
313
Anatomy of an ELF executable
Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…
314
On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
I first started using Python in 1993. It's been my main programming language since about 2000. I've written a ton of code in Python, both for work and in my free time. For several years now, I've been growing dissatisfied with it. Partly it's because I'd like more help from my programming tools, such as static type…
315
Files Are Fraught with Peril
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
316
Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us
They’re not burritos.
317
Is C++ fast?
If you like this blog, you should follow it via RSS and read older posts . Here are the recent posts:
318
Learn Rust the Dangerous Way
LRtDW is a series of articles putting Rust features in context for low-level C programmers who maybe don’t have a formal CS background — the sort of people who work on firmware, game engines, OS kernels, and the like. Basically, people like me.
319
Processing 40TB of code from 10M projects with a dedicated server and Go
The command line tool I created Sloc Cloc and Code (scc) (which is now modified and maintained by many other excellent people) counts lines of code, comments and makes a complexity estimate for files …
320
Implementing a Convolutional Neural Network from Scratch in Python
A simple guide to what CNNs are, how they work, and how to build one from scratch in Python.
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Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused
In part 1 of this series, we built a Sudoku solver based on translating Sudoku to SAT and then giving the resulting SAT instance to a SAT solver. We also benchmarked our solver and found out that it, unsurprisingly, loses to the state of the art of Sudoku solvers. Since
323
How to make your C codebase Rusty: rewriting keyboard firmware keymap
Recently, my colleague introduced me to QMK 1, an open-source keyboard firmware. Like many non-trivia C projects, macro is heavily used everywhere, especially in keymap files 2. It didn’t bother me much since I have been programming C for many years. But I kept thinking to myself, “what would it look like if I can…
324
Defunctionalize the Continuation
Video and transcript of Jimmy Koppel's Compose 2019 talk on defunctionalization, the best refactoring you've never heard of.
325
Voidcall – Making of 13kb JavaScript RTS Game
Like last year with Underrun , I participated in this year's js13kGames – a JavaScript game development competition with a file size limit of 13kb, including code, assets and everything else. My entry was Voidcall , a Real-time Strategy game.
326
WebWindow, a cross-platform webview library for .NET Core
Steve Sanderson's Blog
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Monorepo: please do
You should choose a monorepo because the default behavior it encourages in your teams is visibility and shared responsibility, especially…
329
Go compiler internals: Adding a new statement to Go
Updated (2023-05-08): the Go compiler keeps evolving and it takes time to keep up with changes. While the general gist of this post remains true and it's worth reading to understand how the compiler works on a high level, the details of the modifications are slightly different now.
330
Syntax highlighters are wrong (2014)
Syntax highlighters make value judgments about code. Most highlighters judge that comments are cruft, and try to hide them. Most diff viewers judge that code deletions are bad.