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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it…
I recently changed jobs and found myself in a position where I would need to do a lot of work on remote machines. Since I am Emacs user, the most common way to do this is using TRAMP (Transparent Remote access, Multiple Protcol). TRAMP is an Emacs package that let’s you treat a remote host like a local system, similar…
I love the Kate Text editor. I use it for pretty much all the programming projects I do.…
Anecdotally, this might be the most requested feature in SQL: Allow some trailing commas.
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
The heart of Rust borrow-checking is this: when a borrow is taken, and until it expires, access to the borrowed place is restricted. For example you may not read from a place while it is mutably borrowed.
When the topic of Rails performance comes up, it is commonplace to hear that the database is the bottleneck, so Rails applications are IO-bound anyway, hence Ruby performance doesn’t matter that much, and all you need is a healthy dose of concurrency to make your service scale. But how true is this in general?
Note: Everything that follows is purely my personal opinion as an individual. It should not be seen as any sort of policy of the Meson buil...
I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.
[The wordpress markdown inclusion does a very bad job, it seems, there have been some idiotic formatting errors. I hope that these are fixed, now.] A years-long effort led by Kayvan Memarian and Pe…
If you know one thing about me, it is that I love working on the Rust compiler. Some people kayak, travel or play guitar - and I stare at assembly, trying to figure out what I broke.
It has baked lighting with normal mapping and real-time specular shading, ahem, well sort of. More on that later. The beautiful song was made by noby with guitar performed by Moloko ( https://soundcloud.com/sou_andrade ).
Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version .
A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.
Popular programming languages provide methods or functions which locate a substring in a given string. In C it is the function strstr , the C++ class std::string has the method find , Python's string has methods pos and index , and so on, so forth. All these APIs were designed for one-shot searches . During past…
I spent the past ~4 weeks trying out all the new and fancy AI tools for software development.
Earlier this week, Haroen Viaene posted this tweet about YAML: worst part of yaml: https://yaml.org/type/bool.html — Haroen Viaene (@haroenv) January 10, 2022 The linked-to page contains the documentation on what defines a boolean in YAML, and details that it can be parsed using this regex…
2023-01-01: This project has been ongoing for a while... now its time to post some of this info and see what comes of it. I have access to several junk Milwaukee M18 batteries. Age varies a little. I thought it would be 'fun' to reverse engineer a battery just to see how it functions... That is until I actually opened
If you’ve read anything about compilers in the last two decades or so, you have almost certainly heard of SSA compilers , a popular architecture featured in many optimizing compilers, including ahead-of-time compilers such as LLVM, GCC, Go, CUDA (and various shader compilers), Swift 1 , and MSVC 2 , and just-in-time…
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…
Reviewing the capabilities and limitations of LLM agents in software development and their impact on skilled and less skilled developers.
Musings on the representation, propagation and handling of errors in existing programming languages, as well as thoughts on future systems. (15K+ words)
My attempt at talking about one of the most underrated features of C#.
TinyTapeout VGA 1D Cellular Automata Simulation
Benchmarks and theoretical explanation of why and when hashed radix sort beats hash tables.
Over the past few years, we've seen that next-token prediction scales, denoising diffusion scales, contrastive learning scales, and so on, all the way to the point where we can train models with billions of parameters with a scalable objective that can eat up as much data as we can throw at it. Then, what about…
A comprehensive guide to CRDTs and their tradeoffs, from counters to sequences. Written in the spirit of the Typeclassopedia, exploring how different CRDTs solve the distributed consensus puzzle.
Or: Jonathan Blow is wrong but also right and we still need to prevent the collapse of civilization
