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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.
Vim is a customizable text editor geared towards writing code. But open-ended configuration possibilities lure users into wasting time while chasing after perceived minute gains in productivity. This article describes my Vim journey, starting from heavy personal customization and ending with a renewed love for…
This is quite a popular cartoon. I posted this in a comment on why programmers wear headphones a...
Some days ago I noticed that on a Mac, doing snprintf calls from multiple threads shows curious lack of scaling ( see tweet ). Replacing snprintf with {fmt} library can speed up the OBJ exporter in Blender 3.2 by 3-4 times . This could have been the end of the story, filed under a “eh, sprintf is bad!” drawer, but I…
Yesterday I wrote my first Firefox OS App.
I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: >
A conceptual model for thinking about time in programming that encapsulates the complexity that many programmers cite online
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
Sometimes we have ideas that are bad but demand to enter reality. A few months ago, while chatting with a friend, we toyed around with the idea of a language where the only control flow you get is error handling. This idea embedded itself in my brain and wouldn't let me go, so I kept just talking about it until two…
Maybe I just haven't been paying attention before, but in the last year or so, there seems to have been an increase in discussion around the Nix package manager. This is also what got me to finally try it, and I'm very happy with the results, even if the road is a little bumpy.
Sketches of Elixir : Friends, I am now at least in this respect a rare breed: an Elixir programmer who has never written Ruby. I was never a professional Erlang programmer. I cut my teeth on Python
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
In this post I'll talk about a small game I've been developing in about 24 hours in total (mostly in a few hour blocks during evenings or…
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
Two universal facts about user documentation: Documentation is really important. We are really bad at writing it. We don’t have good theories on what makes for useful documentation. That is except for the four document model, or Diátaxis.1 I’m glad that people use it. I’m also a little frustrated that people use it…
Yesterday I was base64-encoding an image so I could send it to CouchDB to test some code I’m working on for a client. It reminded me of something I did a while back to set cookies on a remote server.
A first attempt at identifying and cataloging DeepSeek's glitched tokens
Interruptions, recovery time, and task size: three numbers that determine if you'll get real work done. Interactive visualizations show the math behind bad days.
Hello! If you already know about the RoCA vulnerability, and you know what I did about it (or you don’t care), then feel free to skip down to the good stuff! Signs of Trouble Monday morning,…
As of late I'm noticing a trend: I'm spending more time having in-person in-depth conversations, and less time coding. While I regret the la...
With some partial evaluation and specialization hints, it is possible to get pretty decent speedups on interpreters by turning them into compilers.
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
Lately, there has been a lot of experimentation with very short programs that synthesize something that sounds like music. I now want to sha...
