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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
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…
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…
While working on my current project, the constant creep of increasing compilation times was becoming more and more noticeable. Even after throwing my usual tools at the problem, the total time was still over 7 seconds.
At work there is a tradition of a Friday quiz being posted by the winner of the previous week. I missed out on the most recent one due to having to duck off early to do my tax but the problem was …
A little while back I found need of a PNG loader for a small project of mine . Being a complete tool I of course decided to write my own -- after all, why save yourself effort when there are still wheels waiting to be reinvented? You can check the source to the inflater code here if you so like - it's quite cleanly…
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.
Hey! If you are a web developer, you should know about CatchJS. It’s a service for tracking and logging errors in JavaScript, with some pretty exciting features. “F.D.R.’s War Pla…
It seems like this time of year anyone with a blog is doing some sort of ‘advent calendar’, i.e. 24 posts leading up to Christmas. For instance there’s a F# one which inspired a C# one (C# copying from F#, that never happens 😉)
Update on the Flask 0.10 and Werkzeug 0.9 releases.
Abstract. This tutorial provides a programmer ' s introduction to the Satisfiability Modulo Theories Solver Z3. It describes how to use Z3 through scripts, provided in the Python scripting language, and it describes several of the algorithms underlying the decision procedures within Z3. It aims to broadly cover almost…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, and built on SQLite and Raft. With its origins dating back to 2014, its design has always prioritized reliability, and quality. The robustness of rqlite is also a testament to its disciplined testing strategy: after more than 10 years…
Distributed Tracing is scary and complicated... right?
In the past I've written about my "home cloud" that used to be OpenVz containers, and how I've come to advocate rebuilding the "build server" for every build
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
Between 2010 and 2019 I interviewed dozens of Software Engineer candidates at Google. Almost always I asked the same interview question…
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…
Since 2009, this website has run on Drupal. Starting with Drupal 6, and progressing through major site upgrades and migrations to 7, 8, 9, and 10, I used the site as a way to dogfood the same CMS (Content Management System) I used in my day job for over a decade. But as time progressed—especially after completing a…
Is it as hard as you think?
I’ve spent the past several years working with functional programming languages in my free time – primarily Haskell and OCaml. I love both languages but also find aspects of each frustrating. Haskell is terse and elegant with type classes providing a powerful mechanism for ad-hoc polymorphism. However, it can also be…
I started using Scala 5 years ago instead of Java after starting (but never quite finishing) to read the first edition of Programming in Scala. First only present in tests, my first attempts at Scala code would quite soon invade small utility classes and before I knew it take over all of my projects. There are many…
The rise of AI-powered coding has created an unexpected market: cleaning up the technical debt from prompt-generated software. Here's why 'Vibe Coding cleanup' is becoming a legitimate service category and what it means for the future of software development.
Inspired by numerous other such lists of falsehoods. Pretty much every video player in existence gets a good chunk if not the vast majority of these wrong. (Some of these also/mostly apply to users, though)
Why "SHA 256-bits enterprise-grade password encryption" is only slightly better than storing passwords in plain text, and better ways to do it.
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…
One person's entry-level contribution is another person's difficult bugfix or backport.
A comprehensive Vim tutorial that teaches Vim as a language rather than memorizing commands. Learn movements, text objects, visual mode, and advanced techniques.
I came upon a very interesting and cryptic snippet of code somewhere nameless , and I can’t decide if it is brilliant or completely insane. It is a very obscure way of accomplishing the required task, but it’s around four times faster than the alternatives I’ve tried, so I have to admit that it’s not completely…
