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A tutorial quantum interpreter in 150 lines of Lisp
a personal blog
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
4442
Faster than earcut: triangulating 3.7M map polygons in 489 ms
We published the triangulator of our map engine as earstrip, an ISC-licensed C++ and WebAssembly library. How it came to be: the ear clipper rebuilt one idea at a time and timed on 3.7 million polygons of real map data.
4443
Parallel Seam Carving
Seam carving is a technique for content-aware resizing, which changes the size of an image while attempting to preserve the interesting content of the image. The basic idea behind the technique is to remove low-energy seams: paths of pixels that are similar to their surroundings. A removed seam can be either vertical…
4444
Scala isn't fun anymore
I’ve just spent over a day, going to sleep at 1:00 am, to upgrade dependencies and fix eviction warnings in the build of a Scala project.
4445
Everything old is new again: memory optimization
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full bl...
4446
Rethinking Visual Programming with Go
This is a blog version of the talk I gave at GopherCon Europe 2019 (Canary Islands Edition) , where I shared my thoughts on why Visual Programming Languages have failed and revealed for the first time my experiment on visualizing Go code.
4447
Questions to ask in interviews
As my RC batch draws to a close, I’m interviewing once again. In the vein of Julia Evans’ great blog post, “Questions I’m asking in interviews” , here’s a set of questions to ask your recruiter, interviewers, and/or prospective manager.
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Why does an extraneous build step make my Zig app 10x faster?
For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained…
4449
Knuth and the Unix Way
Another great post
4450
Rust lifetimes: Getting away with things that would be reckless in C++
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
4451
Forth: The programming language that writes itself
A talk by Dave Gauer , 2023. Made with minslides , which I made for this talk . Use the J and K keys to go forward and backward. You can also just scroll down like a regular web page. Toggle notes/annotations with the N key.
4452
Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
I always felt a little bad for the ghosts in Pac-Man. They patrol the maze, they corner the guy, and then he eats a glowing pellet and suddenly they're the ones running for their lives. So I built a small game where you finally get to play the other side.
4453
VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
4454
ZX Spectrum Raytracer
I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum , the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the…
4455
The Differences Between Deep Research, Deep Research, and Deep Research
Dive into the world of AI engineering with this exploration of Deep Research in report generation. Learn how LLM-as-a-judge systems, machine learning, and ev...
4456
SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
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4458
Tearing apart printf()
How does printf work behind the scenes
4459
Using the most unhinged AVX-512 instruction to make fastest phrase search algo
Disclaimers before we start For those who don’t want to read/don’t care that much, here are the results. I hope after seeing them you are compelled to read. TL;DR: I wrote a super fast phrase search algorithm using AVX-512 and achieved wins up to 1600x the performance of Meilisearch. The source code can be found here…
4460
DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase
How I use DeepWiki to speed up real coding work
4461
Practices of Reliable Software Design
It should have good performance and be able to hold many entries. Reads are more common than writes. I know how I would do it already, but I’m curious about your approach.
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Hand Drawn QR Codes (2025)
I really like QR codes. Recently I purchased a new sticky-note-like pad from a new local stationery store in Minneapolis. The sheets have a 10x10 grid and 2x10 grid. I knew what I wanted to...
4463
Effective Learning Strategies for Programmers
In early September I gave a keynote at Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand on effective learning for programmers. There were two pieces to the talk: one about …
4464
Generators in Firefox now 22 times faster
wingolog: article: generators in firefox now twenty-two times faster
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Microui+fenster=Small GUI
Sometimes I just want to put pixels on a screen. I don’t want to think about SDL this or OpenGL that—I just want to draw my pixel buffer and be done.
4466
Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations
I began with inanimate objects living in a world of forces, and I gave them desires, autonomy, and the ability to take action according to a system of
4467
Opus 1.3 Released
Ever since version 1.1, Opus has been able to automatically detect whether its input is speech or music, and choose the optimal encoding mode accordingly. The original speech/music detector was based on a simple (non-recurrent) neural network, followed by an HMM-based layer to combine the neural network results over…
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Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer
Disclaimer: prepare for hair-splitting and nitpicking
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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
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js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read. Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding. Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on…