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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
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.
As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
An exploration into C++ memory throughput performance.
Well, I think most of you reading this blog use git more or less on a daily basis, but have you ever looked into what is in the .git folder that git creates? Let's explore it together and understand what is going on in there.
Measure frame time, allocations, overdraw, and repeated work before changing code; the useful optimization is the one a trace can prove.
There was a Simpsons episode, I can’t recall correctly, but I think Bart recorded Lisa when her heart broke and he watched it in slow motion to stop exactly at that point. I thought of this e…
LLVM is a godsend of a research tool. Here are some detailed notes on what LLVM is, why you would want to use it for research, and how to get started as a compiler hacker.
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 .
The expressive power of Lisp has drawbacks.
As an investor, I've found that one of the reasons there are fewer female startup founders than male ones is that there are fewer female programmers. So this summer I'm trying an experiment to see...
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
Once upon a time, I was on a small team tasked with building a data pipeline. On this team was someone we’ll call Bob, who was fresh out of grad school and hadn’t had much experience with software engineering, and no experience with SQL. As part of this data pipeline, Bob had to combine the data from two tables. JOIN…
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
You should give it a try!
Artisans, factories and the new material software is made of
Commit messages matter. Here's how to write them well.
PNG is my favourite file format of all time. Version 1.0 of the specification was released in 1996 (before I was born!) and the format remains widely used to this day. I think the main reasons it stuck around for so long are:
I write very short scripts, sometimes for single-line commands. Here's why you should do it too.
Unicode is good. If you’re designing a data structure or protocol that has text fields, they should contain Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8. There’s another question, though: “ Which Unicode characters?” The answer is “Not all of them, please exclude some.”
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
It may not be obvious from my other blog entries, but I work as a Java developer. I also freely confess to enjoy it, which probably makes me part of some minority.
On December 19 2017, Microsoft announced that since insider build 17063 of Windows 10, curl is now a default component. I've been away from home since then so I haven't really had time to sit down and write and explain to you all what this means, so while I'm a bit late, here it comes! … Continue reading Microsoft…
LangChain is complicated, so it must be better. Right?
This is my Code BEAM Europe 2025 talk, converted to a blogpost.
The first step in building my text editor is to implement the core API. If you’re wondering why I want to do this, the original article is here.
