Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.
*Note: Please read all italicized technical words as if they were in a foreign language. The fall semester of my senior year, I was having some serious self-confidence issues. I had slowly come to …
I'm taking a break from debugging books to talk about a calamitous shitshow of textbook writing: Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power , by Robert J. Traister.
Wolfram's Version 14 includes expansive connections to and from LLMs. New learning tools, including courses and books. Plus, functionality advances in math, core language, video objects, trees, finite fields, Knowledgebase, systems engineering, graphics. Astro, biological and chemical computation.
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
Addendum : Many Hacker News commenters correctly point out that the right way to indicate to the compiler that a value does not change is const . This post is not about C best practices, but just about how one can easily get to the bottom of this kind of surprising behavior by looking at the compiler output. This…
Sometimes programmers want to prune out characters from a string of characters. For example, maybe you want to remove all line-ending characters from a piece of text. Let me consider the problem where I want to remove all spaces (' ') and linefeed characters ('\n' and '\r'). How would you do it efficiently? size_t…
A different view on two's complement math.
This post is an attempt to catalog some of my practices around testing Python projects. It's not meant to be treated as dogma- I anticipate I'll update this significantly over time.
How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way.
Exploring how to use 2D graphics in various desktop operating systems, the old-school way. In this part we learn how to create an empty window under Linux, macOS and Windows.
Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the…
A visual exploration of what The Four Color Theorem can say about software complexity.
Last night, a fellow Hacker Schooler challenged me to a running-time contest on the classic eight queens puzzle. Naturally, I pulled up my trusty …
Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.
You have heard of “zip bombs” (a tiny ZIP file that decompresses to multiple gigabytes) and “XML bombs” (small XML file abusing the entities to consume lots of memory), and …
DeepSeek released a new model yesterday: DeepSeek-OCR, a 6.6GB model fine-tuned specifically for OCR. They released it as model weights that run using PyTorch and CUDA. I got it running …
I am happy to announce that after about two years of work, I have made the code for Harlan available to the public. https://github.com/eholk/harlan Harlan is a …
What am I running inside my bash?
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
