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A lazy way to solve differential equations
Looking at Taylor series as streams of real numbers, solving differential equations becomes as easy as writing them.
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.
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A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos
In the past two months or so, I spent some time making tiny GLSL demos. I wrote an article about the first one, Red Alp . There, I went into details about the whole process, so I recommend to check it out first if you're not familiar with the field.
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Build your own operating system
Ten years ago (around the year 2001) I wrote a simple x86 protected-mode OS just to find out how operating systems work. That was really gr...
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Building a constraint programming solver in Julia
How to build a constraint programming solver in Julia. Part 1: Solving Sudoku using backtracking
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Generating Voronoi diagrams using Fortune's algorithm
This article is about using Fortune’s Algorithm to generate Voronoi Diagrams in O(nlogn) time. If I’d known how hard it would be I wouldn’t have started it. If you are intending to implement it with the intent to actually use it, rather than as an exercise, I would recommend not using Fortune’s. Unless you are doing a…
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Undefined behavior in C is a reading error
Considering how important “undefined behavior” has become to C semantics and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 Committee, the lack of any reference to it in the K&R ANSI book is notable and the description in the 1999 C Rationale was quite modest.
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A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
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Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)
A matrix for rating programmers on computer science, software engineering, programming, security, infrastructure, data, AI-assisted development, experience and knowledge, from 2ⁿ to log(n).
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C++ Patterns: The Badge
This post describes the C++ Badge template used to enhance member function access control in Serenity Operating System.
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The beauty of finished software
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word…
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Make your program slower with threads
Years ago, while taking a numerical methods course, I wrote some code to calculate the expected number of shared birthdays in a group. The code is very simple: each attempt constructs a vector of N birthdays, then counts the duplicates. The outer loop runs millions of attempts, and calculates the mean number of shared…
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Compiler Optimizations are Awesome
Another reason for optimizing compilers: It allows us to write simple and obvious code expecting that the compiler will do the optimization. This both reduces the initial defect count and makes the code more maintainable in the long-run. Note that these are also often the simplest optimizations (e.g. a calculation…
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Two types of software engineers
One assumes it's easy because it's a non-technical problem, the other assumes that's why it's hard
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What most young programmers need to learn
In the past 7.5 years I have supervised over a dozen programming interns at Ronimo and have seen hundreds of portfolios of students and gra...
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If you use GNU grep on text files, use the -a (--text) option
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…
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Questions to ask yourself when writing tests
Talk to yourself to make sure your tests help you achieve your aims
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The future of Python web services looks GIL-free
Web frameworks benchmarks on CPython 3.14t looks promising
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Turbo Rascal Syntax Error
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…
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5NF and Database Design
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…
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Common Multithreading Mistakes in C# – Unsafe Assumptions
An in-depth look at exactly what the CPU and runtime can do to subvert us when we don't write properly thread-safe code.
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Python, C, Assembly – Faster Cosine Similarity
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.