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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
One thing you may have noticed about the trigonometric functions sine and cosine is that they seem to have no agreed upon definition. Or rather, different authors choose different definitions as the starting point, mainly based on convenience. This isn’t problematic or even particularly unusual in mathematics: as long…
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
From time to time, people ask me what I use to power my blog, maybe because they like the minimalist form it has. I tell them it’s a bad idea and that I use the Erlang compiler infrastructure for it, and they agree to look elsewhere.
This is a little summary of my current thoughts on Rust. I wonder whether I’ll look back in five years and see if my views have changed.
XAES-256-GCM is a new AEAD extended-nonce algorithm designed for high-level APIs and FIPS 140 compliance.
I’ve been using Rust for hobby projects since 2016 and have been working professionally in Rust since 2021, so I tend to consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Rust. I’m already familiar with all the common limitations of Rust’s type system and how to work around them, so it’s pretty rare that I have to “fight the…
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Hi, I'm Peter Bex, a Scheme and free software enthusiast from the Netherlands. See my user page on the CHICKEN wiki or my git server for some of my projects.
A curated list of misconceptions about mainstream compilers.
Zeke: "Wait, so with generational references, we now have four ways to do memory safety?"
Programmers on the internet often use Turing-completeness terminology. Typically, not being Turing-complete is extolled as a virtue or even a requirement in specific domains. I claim that most such discussions are misinformed --- that not being Turing complete doesn't actually mean what folks want it to mean, and is…
Intro Espressif Systems released their ESP32-S3 SoC a few years ago, but only recently have they released more documentation and support of ...
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two d...
I recently released papaya, a fast and feature-complete concurrent hash table for Rust. In this post I want to dive into the design and research that went into creating it, as well as why you might consider using it over existing solutions.
Ever since I finished publishing the “defer” paper and successfully defended it on its first go-around (it now has tentative approval to go to a Technical Specification, I just need to obtain the necessary written boilerplate to do so), an old criticism
First published 2016.
How to program the Commodore 64 in BASIC, Assembly or C using Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Mac, Windows and Linux!
👋🏼 This is part of series on concurrency, parallelism and asynchronous programming in Ruby. It’s a deep dive, so it’s divided into 12 main parts: Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 1 Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 2 Consistent, request-local state Ruby methods are colorless The…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Some companies use an isolated network or even the complete lack of a network as a security measure to protect from unauthorized access. Working on these systems can be a struggle but it is still possible, and perhaps even more important, to use a proper version control tool like Git.
Learn chess openings and variations online by repeating the most popular chess Master moves
Viewing my binary file with ImHex. The pattern language pane, on the right,...
A play in one act Dramatis personae EM, an engineering manager TL, the tech lead for the team X, an engineering manager from a different team Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are ado…
Unlocking the Parallel Universe: Subinterpreters and Free-Threading in Python 3.13
Hey everyone! This article is brought to you by a shameless nerd snipe, courtesy of Pascal. In case you’ve blocked Twitter for your own good, this reads: There should be a post explaining and compa...
If you go directly to the most abstract ideas then you’re basically like a kid who reads a book of famous quotes about life and thinks they understand everything about life by way of those quotes.
Thistle Tea is my new World of Warcraft private server project. You can log in, create a character, run around, and cast spells to kill mobs, with everything synchronized between players as expected for an MMO. It was floating around in my head to build this for a while, since I have an incurable nostalgia for early…
Pattern matching is a pervasive and powerful tool in Elixir. This isn't too surprising if you know a little about the history of Elixir's parent language, Erlang. Erlang was originally inspired by and written in Prolog, a logic programming language where pattern matching has first-class support. In
