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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
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.
I've made my own web-based coding environment for working on little projects. A few years ago I found Glitch. It's great: a web-based coding environment that makes it really easy to quickly start edit
How to stream local files using Python and 11 lines of code.
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 1. lisp to assembly
For the past two months I've been spending half my time on Tauthon . Tauthon is a backwards-compatible Python interpreter that runs Python 2 code and C-extensions exactly as-is, while also allowing Python 2 programmers to use the most exciting new language features from Python 3. These new backported language features…
I've been enjoying using Go's database/sql package for working with databases. Recently, some mentions of gorm piqued my curiosity about using ORMs in Go vs. using database/sql directly. Having had some mixed experiences with ORMs in the past, I decided to start with a practical experiment by writing the same simple…
I recently had cause to take a beginners course in R - a language I'm fairly familiar with. One of the other students had never used it before, so we were buddied up in order for me to show them the ropes. The first lesson of R is always the same. Read a CSV, manipulate it a bit, draw a graph. We did it all without…
One of the anonymous reviewers of my recently published Storage Combinators paper ( pdf ) complained that hiding disk-based, remote, and lo...
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Many years ago, I've been waiting for a language like Go. Back then, I was primarily working with C (for microcontrollers), and C++/Java/Python/etc (for bigger machines). These are great tools, but still I was longing for compiled, statically typed, memory-safe (and garbage collected) language, which compiles for the…
Sobit Akhmedov is a staff software engineer with 14 years experience building e-commerce, financial and cloud storage solutions for startup and Big Five companies.
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.
Stop writing Javascript frameworks. Translations: Chinese Japanese Russian Here's the talk, based on this essay, that I gave at OSCON 2015. [Slides] The 100-line templating library presented as a Gist has been cleaned up, documented, and published as the Stamp library. JavaScript frameworks seem like death and taxes…
QBE is a compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code. QBE fosters language innovation by offering a compact user-friendly and performant backend. The size limit constrains QBE to focus on the essential and prevents embarking on a never-ending path…
Modern processors have instructions to process several bytes at once. Effectively all processors have the capability of processing 16 bytes at once. These instructions are called SIMD, for single instruction, multiple data. It was once an open question whether these instructions could be useful to accelerate common…
A deep dive into how a 'one-shot' Claude headless loop (paired with scoring, defensive tooling, and a simple bash driver) massively accelerates matching decompilation of Snowboard Kids 2 on the Nintendo 64.
Published: 02-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Why Vmail? Because some people are 1000 times more productive and happy in Vim than in any web browser or GUI program.
This is a series of brief articles aimed at teaching Emacs to computer professionals who are unfamiliar with it. I do not dwell on the basics of the user interface, which can be learned from the built-in tutorial. Instead, each article in this series will distill one very specific command line (CLI) tool or technique…
By default, log based on fixed time intervals rather than number of messages.
During one of my assignments, I worked with GitHub Actions pretty much every day. I implemented workflows, created new actions, and helped people migrate their projects from jenkins to actions. As much as I like actions – and I like them a lot – there are some things that caught me off guard. I have collected some of…
When I catch a bug before release I’m usually glad, because I’ve narrowly averted ruining someone’s experience or eating their data. Today I found a bug that I wish I hadn’t caught, a bug that I wish I’d released into the wild to witness in its full glory. I found this bug in my digital card game Ring of Worlds, and…
