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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of…
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…
tldr; With GPT-3, Supabase, Pinecone, and Klaviyo, I built a semantic embeddings search that saved hundreds of hours of manual work for my girlfriends skincare brand ( Oliver Care ).
The ultimate type-level trickery
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Vim one-liners for fast text edits: count words, format JSON, delete blank lines, sum the numbers in a file, extract IP addresses, and open files in splits.
TLDR: Demo is at , code is at . The Problem When building a website or app using HTML Canvas, it’s often a requirement to support a flood fill. That is, when the user chooses a colour and cli…
To be precise, IEEE-754 floating point subtraction is functionally complete . That means you can construct any binary circuit using nothing but floating point subtraction.
Between 2010 and 2019 I interviewed dozens of Software Engineer candidates at Google. Almost always I asked the same interview question…
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
my website is one binary 2022-04-06 ---------------------------- a.k.a. this one weird trick that inspires me to program creatively i have struggled for years to figure out a website framework that feels good to me. i tried all of the classics, including but limited to: - ghost - hugo - jekyll - sr.ht + tarball …
[Hacker News discussion, LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
Async Rust is a whole new world of programming. Let's try to understand it by working our way through a series of web servers, learning the details of concurrency and I/O along the way.
Much has been written on Common Lisp; there is rarely one year without someone proclaming the death of the language and how nobody uses it anymore. And yet it is still here, so something must have…
Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests…
In this article, previously part of my new book, we look at the introduction of .NET Core, why it was created, and how it has evolved into .NET 7.
The second part of a three part look at new features in Go 1.20.
I recently implemented a Brainfuck interpreter in the Crystal programming language and I’d like to share my honest opinion about working in the language.
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…
“shouldn’t this have been published a few months ago?” yeah, probably. I even considered submitting it to the AoC contest. time is a real beast. The title is clickbait. I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out…
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.
I implemented new --shuffle option for GNU make to simulate non-deterministic build order in parallel makefiles.
I used to teach React at a local coding bootcamp, and I noticed that students kept getting tripped up by the same handful of things. In this article, we're going to go through 9 of the most dastardly gotchas. I'll show you how to solve these common problems, so you can avoid a lot of potential frustration!
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