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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.
Sometimes a pure Python script can't just deliver the performance we need. When that's the case we have to resort to writing our logic in a "fast" compiled language like C or Rust and expose the function with through a Python module. This way we get the best of both worlds. Today I focus on how to use Rust for writing…
After the initial learning curve, I found that Cardboard WM help me stay focused on one task and it greatly reduced how much time I spent rearranging my windows.
I want to view a picture of a funny cat I found on the web. How hard can it be?
After many years of development, the Vale compiler just hit its 100,000th line of code.
I recently got to participate in a psychological experiment for programmers. A friend of mine, Mike Hansen, is doing research on how people comprehend programs.…
I’ve been running a Kubernetes cluster on a mix of virtual and bare metal machines with Hetzner for about a year now, and while the setup has served me well, being a very exploratory exercise at the time it wasn’t very well documented.
To quote the last part of this blog post, "I think it's [asyncio] really well done, it's fun to use, and I still am interested in having more of a SQLAlchemy story for it, because I'm sure folks will still want this no matter what anyone says.". To that end, SQLAlchemy 1.4 now includes complete support for asyncio …
A concise summary of Python’s versions, and what’s in each.
Imagine you are in an interview and you get asked "can you implement bubble sort"...and you answer...
So, it's finally here. My second book, entitled The GNU Make Book and published by No Starch Press later this month (electronically it's a...
Jeff Atwood wrote up a post today on the merits of writing a technical book in this day-and-age and specifically called out my past post on programming book profits and my work-in-progress Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja .
Negative prompts can be far superior than traditional prompt additions.
Last month I announced a toy project called QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression.
Writing quality software is hard. Sometimes, software breaks in entertaining ways. However, when software runs everything from personal assistants like Alexa and Google Home to banking to elections, some bugs can be much more severe. Thi...
Since I just committed the last pending patch to improve hash indexes to PostgreSQL 11, and since most of the improvements to hash indexes w...
Dissecting various compression algorithms.
In some previous blog posts we described in details how one can generalize automatic differentiation to give automatically stability enhancements and all sorts of other niceties by incorporating graph transformations into code generation. However, one of the things which we didn’t go into too much is the limitation of…
Wishing Compiler Explorer a very happy tenth birthday
Hi everyone! Here's part three of my favorite programming, computer, and science books. If you're just joining, please see part one and part two for introduction. This time I'll be sharing my favorite books about Unix, logic programming, thermodynamics, and mathematical foundations of computer science. In one of the...
For those who aren’t regular readers: as a followup to this post, there are four posts detailing the basic four methods of proof, with intentions to detail some more advanced proof techniques in the future. You can find them on this blog’s primers page. Do you really want to get better at mathematics? Remember when…
People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.
I've just finished the final rewrite of my website. I'm not lying: this is the last time I'm ever going to do it. This website has gone through countless rewrites – from WordPress to Jekyll to multiple static site generators of my own – but this is the final one. I know so, because I've found the ultimate method for…
A medical professional built a patient management app using AI, exposed all patient data unprotected to the internet, and sent voice recordings to AI services without consent. Likely violating Swiss nDSG and other laws.
In my book Understanding the Odin Programming Language I wrote that “Odin incorporates some of my favorite C best practices, straight into the language”. But I didn’t really elaborate on the details. Let’s do that here! This brings me to talking a bit about a previous job I had. Back in 2021 I worked at a place called…
There is no denying that containers have taken over the mindset of most modern teams. With containers, comes the need to have orchestration to run those containers and currently there is no real alternative to Kubernetes. Love it or hate it, it has become the standard platform we have largely
Agile Software Development may be mainstream, but much of what's done is faux-agile, and we need to push back.
