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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
Usually, x86 tutorials don’t spend much time explaining the historical perspective of design and naming decisions. When learning x86 assembly, you’re usually told something along the lines: Here’s EAX . It’s a register. Use it.
Note: I copied this from http://misspiggy.gsfc.nasa.gov/tao.html and stripped out all of the IMHO extraneous formatting. ---Alex
Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post . Let's look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let's download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel.
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
I write very short scripts, sometimes for single-line commands. Here's why you should do it too.
Sponsoring this project will help achieve swift completion and ensure the maintenance of psycopg2, psycopg3 and other related projects.
In these videos, I talk about how VGA signals work and build a circuit that provides the correct timing of sync signals so that a monitor recognizes the signal and displays an image stored on an EEPROM.
One of the most common "data type" in programming is the text string. When programmers think of a string, they imagine that they are dealing with a list or an array of characters. It is often a "good enough" approximation, but reality is more complex. The characters must be encoded into bits in some way. Most ……
It’s been just over two years since I started learning Rust. Since then, I’ve used it heavily at my day job, including work in the Firecracker code base, and a number of other projects. Rust is a great fit for the systems-level work I’ve been doing over the last few years: often performance- and density-sensitive…
When I ask people at trendy big tech companies why algorithms quizzes are mandatory, the most common answer I get is something like "we have so much scale, we can't afford to have someone accidentally write an O(n^2) algorithm and bring the site down" 1 . One thing I find funny about this is, even though a decent…
Making music with low-level C code, from a simple saw wave to playing melodies
Unless you live under one of the few rocks that still lack Internet access, you’ve probably already heard of an “event queue” . If not, maybe “message queue”, or “event loop”, or “message pump” rings a bell. To refresh your memory, let’s walk through a couple of common manifestations of the pattern.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how when I’ve worked on any kind of distributed system, including systems as simple as a web app with frontend and backend code, probably upwards of 80% of my time is spent on things I wouldn’t need to do if it weren’t distributed. I came up with the following description…
The Lumen Project is an alternative implementation of the Erlang VM, more known as the BEAM. It is designed to work in WebAssembly with the specific goal of bringing Elixir and Erlang to the browser.
How the JPEG format works: file headers and markers, Huffman coding, quantization, zigzag and the DCT, explained by writing a JPEG decoder in Python.
Welcome, This is the index page for my "Reverse engineering the rendering of The Witcher 3" small series where I select some rendering tec...
Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about how there’s more to a pointer than meets the eye. One key point I was trying to make is that just because two pointers point to the same address...
Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…
Context It’s not often I get excited about programming languages since meeting Ruby in 2015. Way before that, drowning in misery of writing university course works in Java, has pushed me away from development. Ruby’s freedom and expressiveness was what pulled me back, and its style has kept me in. I was on the lookout…
An in-depth look at Data-Oriented Architecture (DOA): monolithic data stores vs microservices, scaling benefits, and real-world case studies.
I booted the arm64e kernel of macOS 11.0.1 beta 1 kernel in QEMU up to launchd. It’s completely useless, but may be interesting if you’re wondering how an Apple Silicon Mac will boot.
A couple of years ago, I started my first job as a programmer. On the first day, I entered the office, sat in my new chair, turned on the computer, checked out a project from the version control system and opened it in IDE. The first-ever piece of the code I saw looked like that: // TODO it works, but it's ugly…
Over the last year, my 13 year old nephew developed a love for hacking. From anime chat , to snake , a minimal twitter , a blog , to an anime music startup , he’s built some cool stuff (1). What I’m most proud of though, is that he’s done this with self directed play, rather than with a rigid curriculum.
A look into how Python is used to bring your favorite movies to the big screen.
Last year (2019), we released the simjson library. It is a C++ library available under a liberal license (Apache) that can parse JSON documents very fast. How fast? We reach and exceed 3 gigabytes per second in many instances. It can also parse millions of small JSON documents per second. The new version is much ……
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…
