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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.

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3781

agentzh's Nginx Tutorials

I've been doing a lot of work in the Nginx world over the last few years and I've also been thinking about writing a series of tutorial-like articles to explain to more people what I've done and what I've learned in this area. Now I have finally decided to post serial articles to the Sina Blog…

3782

Why Rust strings seem hard

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes from people trying to get into Rust who get really hung up on strings (&str, String, and their relationship). Beyond Rust’s usual challenges around ownership, there can be an added layer of frustration because strings are so easy in the great majority of languages. You just…

3791

Buttery Smooth “10fps” (2020)

The GIF (/ɡɪf/ GHIF) file is unfortunately the most popular and widespread form of exchanging animated content across the internet. Oh crap here’s one now A Pokémon I 3D modeled and animated called Shuppet, in 50fps When I am making animations, with the intent of ultimately becoming a GIF file on the internet, I…

3798

Baba Is Eval

Baba is You is a sokoban puzzle game where the rules themselves have to be manipulated to win. (For the uninitiated, the store page should explain the idea best.) The level of abstraction required to solve most levels makes it a formidable reasoning benchmark, with many reasoning steps being completely orthogonal to…

3800

The Transformer Family

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…

3801

Hash-based bisect debugging in compilers and runtimes

Does this sound familar? You make a change to a library to optimize its performance or clean up technical debt or fix a bug, only to get a bug report: some very large, incomprehensibly opaque test is now failing. Or you add a new compiler optimization with a similar result. Now you have a major debugging job in an…

3803

Lossy CSS compression for fun and loss (or profit)

Late last year, I had an idea that’s been steadily brewing in my head. I’ve found myself with some free time recently (it coincided with vacation, go figure), and I’ve hacked together some proof-of-concept code. Whether or not it is actually proving the concept I’m not sure, but the results are somewhat interesting…

3804

Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?

vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…