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Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder
A version of Flappy Bird that runs entirely inside MacOS Finder. It runs at 4 frames a second! That's a lot of frames!!
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,530 posts.
452
When your data doesn’t fit in memory: the basic techniques
You can process data that doesn’t fit in memory by using four basic techniques: spending money, compression, chunking, and indexing.
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Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
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How DOOM fire was done
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
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An Illustrated Guide to Useful Command Line Tools
A short description and screenshot of some useful command line tools I use that aren't part of typical POSIX environment.
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Write libraries instead of services, where possible
For any developer with limited resources, this means a library (where viable) can provide the same functionality to the user, at a lower cost to the developer than a service.
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Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language
The network stack does several seemingly-impossible things. It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups. It adapts smoothly to network congestion. It provides addressing to billions of active nodes. It routes packets around damaged network infrastructure…
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Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
Recently, I came across a few old and new interviews of Donald Knuth (sources: (i) Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth , (ii) Interviews conducted by Lex Fridman Part 1 and Part 2 ), where he sheds light on his work habits, how he approaches problems, and his philosophy towards happiness. I really enjoyed reading…
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A search engine in 80 lines of Python
In this post I explain how I built a search engine from scratch using python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs I follow.
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Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery
The landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover last month amazed the world. The stunning footage of the descent shows each stage of the sequence. If you have not seen it already you can watch it here .
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If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds.
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…
467
The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
Translations: Chinese, Vietnamese. (V2 Nov 2022: Updated images for more precise description of forward diffusion. A few more images in this version) AI image generation is the most recent AI capability blowing people’s minds (mine included). The ability to create striking visuals from text descriptions has a magical…
468
How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
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Open source collaborative text editors
For years now I've had this itch, trying to find the "perfect" collaborative text editor. But not just any collaborative text editor, oh no, my speciality is finding (well, at least looking for) open source real-time collaborative web-based rich text editors...
470
WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Twenty years of Valgrind
It has been twenty years since Valgrind 1.0 was released.
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I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it
The personal website of Elias Daler about programming, technology and videogames
473
Strong_password Rubygem hijacked
I recently updated minor and patch versions of the gems our Rails app uses. We want to keep dependencies fresh, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities addressed while maintaining a high chance ...
474
Simple React Patterns
I've been writing React applications for a few years now, and I've noticed that some patterns tend to repeat themselves. In this post, I'll review these patterns which will summarize about 99% of the React code I write every day.
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Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
476
Postgres as a graph database
You don't need Neo4j for graph data. Walking through nodes, edges, and recursive traversals in plain Postgres, with working SQL.
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It takes a PhD to develop that
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
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A critical look at MCP
"MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data…
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Papers every developer should read at least twice (2009)
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read - (At Least Twice)