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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.
It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinions about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Co...
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
This post assumes some basic C skills. Linux puts you in full control. This is not always seen from everyone’s perspective, but a power user loves to be in control. I’m going to show yo…
Like almost all rules, there are cases where breaking them is a good idea and seasoned writers may well object with "but" responses for some of these. Thus, consider the rules below as mental rumble strips - you should probably slow down and think if you encounter these cases.
I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough,...
Christmas is coming up. When I used to work at a bank the entire month of December and a bit of January we were placed under “Change Freeze”. We weren’t allowed to deploy updates to our applications during this period. The thinking was: A lot of people are away over Christmas Application changes can lead to crashes…
I’d like to share with you my latest project: Decktility!
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
A different view on two's complement math.
Exploring how to use 2D graphics in various desktop operating systems, the old-school way. In this part we learn how to create an empty window under Linux, macOS and Windows.
Have you seen this legendary SQL iceberg meme? Let's talk about it while wearing our PostgreSQL hat!
Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious! Today’s pick is the latter. Reproducing the issue, part 1 (It may be tempting to skip that section, but reproducing an issue is an important p...
In the early days of the platform, Android developers working from Linux and Mac OS X connected their device via an USB cable and were good to go. Windows users had to find and then install drivers. That was super-annoying.
FairPlay comprises a set of algorithms created by Apple for digital rights management (also called DRM, digital rights management). FairPlay is currently used to manage the decryption of iOS applications during their installation on Apple devices. In fact, we know that Apple distributes all applications in the Apple…
Assembly code scares people. There’s a good reason for that. For many people, writing code in assembly language seems equivalent to writing code in ancient dwarven runes, or calculating pi in roman numerals. The fact that RollerCoaster Tycoon was almost completely written in assembly language sounds almost too amazing…
How I built a graphical bootable "game" for the Raspberry Pi (or any other modern computer) in C#.
UPDATE: I gave a talk expanding on this blog post at EMPEX NYC 2023 . The Problem Writing useful features for your users is key to a succes...
In 1969, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry. In it, they showed that a single-layer perceptron cannot compute the XOR function. The main argument relies on linear separability: Perceptrons are linear classifiers, which essentially means drawing a line to…
The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.
I've been trying to invest more and more of my free time interacting with founders. I genuinely feel we've been through a lot with Sentry and I can provide some useful value to others. More so, I believe most people in this industry, most successful people, do others a disservice but not having honest conversations…
I recently wrote about completing Advent of Code 2022 using a different programming language (or two) every day for 25 days.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
I already have a dedicated post about a hypothetical Zig language server. But perhaps the most important thing I've written so far on the topic is the short note at the end of Zig and Rust.
Funding In total urllib3 received $26,615 USD in financial support and distributed $18,622 USD to maintainers and community contributors. We're thankful for the financial support we receive from o...
The other day at work, we had a situation where we suspected a thread leak in one particular service, i.e. code which continuously starts new threads, without taking care of ever stopping them again. …
Demystifying Apache Arrow - some observations from a data scientist. Learning more about a tool that can filter and aggregate two billion rows on a laptop in two seconds
