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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
Graphics is all about geometry. In particular, there are points that have a certain color, and the pattern of colors gives you a certain picture. You can change the way the points are distributed by applying certain transformations like translation (movement), rotation and scaling. While most people familiar with the…
Language models assign probability values to sequences of words. Those three words that appear right above your keyboard on your phone that try to predict the next word you’ll type are one of the uses of language modeling. In the case shown below, the language model is predicting that “from”, “on” and “it” have a high…
Last week, I wrote a small nifty tool called bisect-binary , which semi-automates answering the question “To what extent can I fill this file up with zeroes and still have it working”. I wrote it it in Haskell, and part of the Haskell code, in the Intervals.hs module, is a data structure for “subsets of a file”…
Hello! If you already know about the RoCA vulnerability, and you know what I did about it (or you don’t care), then feel free to skip down to the good stuff! Signs of Trouble Monday morning,…
A matrix for rating programmers on computer science, software engineering, programming, security, infrastructure, data, AI-assisted development, experience and knowledge, from 2ⁿ to log(n).
Another reason for optimizing compilers: It allows us to write simple and obvious code expecting that the compiler will do the optimization. This both reduces the initial defect count and makes the code more maintainable in the long-run. Note that these are also often the simplest optimizations (e.g. a calculation…
An in-depth look at exactly what the CPU and runtime can do to subvert us when we don't write properly thread-safe code.
I’m very excited to announce that today I’m open-sourcing atool I’ve been working on for several months at Google.It’s called Bloaty McBloatface, and it lets...
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
Next week, Mozilla will release Firefox 57. Also referred to as Firefox Quantum, from the project name we've used for all the work that has been put into making this the most awesome Firefox release ever. This is underscored by the fact that I've gotten mailed release-swag for the first time during my four years ……
Sometimes programmers want to prune out characters from a string of characters. For example, maybe you want to remove all line-ending characters from a piece of text. Let me consider the problem where I want to remove all spaces (' ') and linefeed characters ('\n' and '\r'). How would you do it efficiently? size_t…
These days it’s a pretty bold claim if you say that you invented a sorting algorithm that’s 30% faster than state of the art. Unfortunately I have to make a far bolder claim: I wrote a …
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1). I am not…
I was talking to a very junior programmer recently and he asked me a great question. A question so good, it made me stop and think about my perspective on how learning happens. The question was: “H…
I do not write code for a living. Nor do I study computer science in university. And you know why this is great? Because it allows me to code completely stupid and useless things without anybody being on my back to tell me I shouldn’t. And what I am about to talk is precisely one of these codes…
Deep dive into how scheduler works
The latest 4.13.9 source release of the Linux kernel is 780MiB, but thanks to xz compression, the download is a much more managable 96 MiB (an 88% reduction)
Linux has an elegant and beautiful design when it comes to threads: threads are nothing more than processes that share a virtual address space and file descriptor table. Threads spawned by a process are additional child processes of the main “thread’s” parent process. They’re manipulated through the same process…
A list of youtube channels that talks about programming
Consider the following pseudocode: x <- 32; y <- 0; while(true){ x <- x – floor((1/8) * y); y <- y + floor((1/8) * x); plotPointAt(x, y); } x and y are always integers. This draws…
At a recent RubyConf, Chad Fowler presented his ideas for writing software systems that mirror the process of continual replacement observed in biological systems.
Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...
Finite-state machine (FSM) is a wonderful model of computation that has many practical applications. One of my favorites is turning business logic into simple FSMs. For example consider the following requirements for an order management system:
