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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.
Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations. In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems, taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Z
In my last blog entry LLand LR Parsing Demystified, we explored LL and LR parsers from ablack-box perspective. We arrived at a model for these parsers whereb...
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
By Devine Lu Linvega
When I first started using Claude Code, I had a naive approach to working with it. I would describe the task directly in the prompt, press Enter, and cross my fingers. If the agent made mistakes, I would tell it how to fix them. For small tasks, this can be good enough, but as the task grows in complexity, this…
Rust's error handling is a pleasure to use thanks to the Result type . It ensures Rust's error handling is always correct , visible , and performant . And with the addition of the ? operator in Rust 1.13 , and the addition of return types from main in Rust 1.26 Rust's error handling has only kept improving.
In response to the call for blogs about the vision for Rust for 2020, I’m going to write about GUI. I believe the time is right for a native GUI toolkit written in Rust, and that such a thing would fill a very important niche. There is a demand for performance (which, to me, includes startup time, RAM footprint, and…
I’ve been working on building a compacting garbage collector in Ruby for a while now, and one of the biggest hurdles for implementing a compacting GC is updating references. For example, if Object A points to Object B, but the compacting GC moves Object B, how do we make sure that Object A points to the new location?…
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
Best practices for writing Go code, from the halcyon days of its youth.
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.
In this tutorial, you'll learn 16 ways for doing concurrency in Clojure including how to start threads and how to communicate between them.
An interactive exploration of quadtrees. Start with brute-force spatial search, build recursive space partitioning step by step, then use it for point lookups, range queries, nearest-neighbor search, collision detection, and image compression.
Reviewing the capabilities and limitations of LLM agents in software development and their impact on skilled and less skilled developers.
Personal Website and Blog of Martin Klepsch
C++ remains one of the leading programming languages in game development despite the emergence of new technologies and languages. Its flexibility, performance, and extensive ecosystem make it the preferred choice for building complex game systems, engines, and high-performance applications.
Short answer: because we said so.
If you would like me to grade your answers, please send an email to cperciva-exam-part1@tarsnap.com [EDIT: I have now finished marking part 1 answers; please do not send me any more] with your answers to the above questions along with the following two:
Patterns and structures of current operating systems and some thoughts about how that could be improved, with lessons learnt from Self, Smalltalk and other "structured" systems.
Using the best tool for a job may slow things down. It may be "best" in a sense you don't need. The actual best tool might be relatively crude.
I’ve got a challenge for you. The next time you start a new project, try not using a PHP framework.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Every programming language has some fundamental idea(s) that drives its design and evolution. For Haskell that’s functional purity and state-of-the-art static typing, for Erlang that’s distributed programming and fault tolerance, for Clojure that’s simplicity and stability. What all these examples have in common is…
There’s some 2015 research out of Microsoft titled Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs 1 1 Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs; How the Current Code Review Best Practice Slows Us Down ; Czerwonka, Greiler, Tilford; IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering; 2015. which seems strangely named because reviewers do find…
