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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
Linear Algebra Geometric Algebra Applications Multiplying Vectors Rotors Double Angle Formula Complex Numbers Characterizing B Ratios Conjugates Geometric Algebra is fascinating, and I believe solves a large number of problems that arise from a more traditional approach to vectors, but I've been very disappointed with…
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences , and the…
During my internship at Jane Street 1 , one of my projects was a config editing tool that at first sounded straightforward but culminated in me designing a custom tree diffing algorithm using dynamic programming, relentlessly optimizing it and then transforming it into an A* accelerated path finding algorithm. This…
(update 26-Aug-2020: the MSVC team has recently added C11language support to their roadmap, hooray!)
Why we rewrote our backend from Python/Django to Node.js one week after launching Skald.
SwiftUI is currently the new trend in the Apple development world. And I wanted to give it a try. I did. However, in this post, I explain why I went back to AppKit for The Untitled Project’s authoring tools.
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
Ongoing According to Repology , the latest packaged Git for Windows is version . To keep up with releases of Git for Windows, which includes Git Bash and the Mintty terminal emulator , see github.com/git-for-windows/git/releases or groups.google.com/g/git-for-windows .
<p> Python standard library includes many great modules that can help you make your code cleaner and simpler and <code class="inline">functools</code> is d...
Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. A different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk's syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.
[Adobe would like me to make it clear that the opinions below are not the official views of the company and are entirely my own.] By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms. Obviously Adobe is […]
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
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It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
I was inspired by the release of Apple’s M1 ARM processor to tweet about the perils of lock-free programming which led to some robust discussion. The discussion went pretty well given the inanity o…
Would you believe me, if I claimed that an algorithm which has been on the books as "optimal" for 46 years, which have been analyzed in excruciating detail by geniuses like Knuth and taught in all CS courses in the world, can be optimized to run ten times faster ?
Guide to implementing a C standard library for bare metal hardware using Newlib, enabling powerful functions like printf and malloc without relying on an operating system. This step-by-step guide demonstrates how to configure and integrate Newlib on RISC-V architecture, showing you how to redirect standard I/O through…
In my #rust2020 blog post , I mentioned rather off-handedly that I think the time has come for us to talk about forming a Rust foundation. I wanted to come back to this topic and talk in more detail about what I think a Rust foundation might look like. And, since I don’t claim to have the final answer to that question…
There are three books that I believe that every self-taught computer scientist should read. These are books that I often recommend to smart junior developers that learned their knowledge by doing instead of schooling. These are books that will close the gap for people that fall into the category of ...
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can be…
Update: Since this post was written, Go 1.11beta2 has been released. I’ve updated the setup section to reflect this. Russ Cox kindly wrote to me to explain the reasoning behind storing the Go module cache in $GOPATH . I’ve included his response inline.
This article is intended to help C & C++ programmers understand the essentials of what the linker does. I've explained this to a number of colleagues over the years, so I decided it was time to write it down so that it's more widely available (and so that I don't have to explain it again). [Updated March 2009 to…
Background: Joystick Preventing Display Sleep A few months ago, I thought I ought to try Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. The facsimile of o...
