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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…
Expressive code in C++
You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.
On July 31st , Canada’s COVID Alert app was made available for general use, though it does not have support for actually reporting a diagnosis in most provinces, yet.
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
I would like to preface this article by saying that Haskell is great. I have been using it as my go-to for native applications for several years now. Everything that follows is a product of my love and affection for the language, and a desire to see it succeed. And none of this is intended to disparage the efforts of…
Today, we’re going to look at the many ways of implementing user-to-kernel transitions on x86, i.e. system calls. Let’s first quickly review what system calls actually need to accomplish.
Note: me telling you up front that these are trick questions rather gives the answers away in most cases, but oh well. Questions Question 1 What's the fastest way to sort a jumbled array, given that the array has length N and contains all the integers from 1 to N inclusi...
Through work I have to deal with a pretty huge codebase, and run Pylint on it during our continuous integration process. It's always been a bit slow, but recently I also noticed that it was consuming a lot of memory, causing OOM failures if we tried to run it too much in parallel.
My hobby : opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more…
A few thoughts to consider when using React hooks
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
A quick overview of the most common text processing terminal tools and why they should be part of your day-to-day toolbox.
I’ve noticed a small pattern across a few of my projects where I had vectorized and parallelized some code. The original algorithm had a “push” approach, the optimized version instead took a “pull” approach. In this article I’ll describe what I mean, though it’s mostly just so I can show off some pretty videos…
Grocery shopping has been one of my least favorite chores, even before the pandemic. Unlike many people I know, I always preferred online shopping over going to the supermarket. Now it’s not a matter
The heap is a data structure that I use all the time and that others somehow use rarely. (I once had a coworker tell me that he knew some code was mine because it used a heap) Recently I was writin…
I. Introduction
A passionate engineering student who writes about Unix related topics and tech stuff.
On a lobste.rs thread about the rationale for the Fennel language, I posted this summary of why Oil exists:
It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…
I have taught operating systems at my university, so I will link my notes from that course here regarding the virt I/O protocol. This protocol has changed over the years, but the one that QEMU implements is the legacy MMIO interface.
With Apple’s recent announcement that they are moving away from Intel X86 CPU’s to their own ARM CPU’s for future laptops and desktops I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the some differences that can affect systems programmers working in Rust.
