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A Guide to Fast Page Loads
Your website is slow, but the backend is fast. How do you diagnose performance issues on the frontend of your site? We'll discuss everything involved in constructing a webpage and how to profile it...
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
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Writing an OS in Rust: Introduction to Paging
This post introduces paging, a very common memory management scheme that we will also use for our operating system. It explains why memory isolation i…
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Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use.
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All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. To name a few: an “everything app” called 75grand with dining hall menus, Moodle assignments, building hours, an event calendar, and more; two unfinished course catalogs; and a university shuttle tracker. None…
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When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
Last month I have been on a multi-day hike with my dad. Each of us took many pictures, and when we came back we put them all in a shared folder. We both have Android phones, and the naming scheme used for our pictures was the same: IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss followed maybe by some other numbers and then a .jpg . Here YYYY…
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Don't set the language of your website based on user location
Location-based language setting is a bad idea. It's much better to use the browser's language.
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History and Effective Use of Vim
This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully.
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Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys
You can use of UUIDs as the primary key to avoid database scale problems. But should you? I propose an alternative.
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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
In this article, we explore Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. We explore its syntax, current uses and possible uses; we test its scripting system, which is incredibly powerful; we compare it with LaTeX, Markdown and Word, which can be used in similar roles; and we explore its applicability to the task…
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Talks that changed the way I think about programming
The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he destroyed it. He…
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You are never taught how to build quality software
Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?
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Browsers are pretty good at loading pages
Client-side navigation is supposed to make your pages load faster. But when I tried it, it was actually slower! Why?
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Weld: Accelerating numpy, scikit and pandas as much as 100x with Rust and LLVM
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
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Software Engineering Within SpaceX
Have you ever been curious about how Software engineering within SpaceX works? I did some research and compiled my notes in this article. There are also some…
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“Exit traps” can make your Bash scripts more robust and reliable (2013)
There is a simple, useful idiom to make your bash scripts more robust - ensuring they always perform necessary cleanup operations, even when something unexpected goes wrong. The secret sauce is a pseudo-signal provided by bash, called EXIT, that you can trap ; commands or functions trapped on it will execute when the…
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'New' Python modules of 2015
As I’ve been blogging a lot more about Python over the last year, I thought I’d list a few of my favourite ‘new’ Python modules from 2015. These aren’t necessarily modules that were newly released in 2015, but modules that were ‘new to me’ this year – and may be new to you too!
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Bug #915: Please help
Updated: this was solved on Hacker News. Details in Bug #915: solved!
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In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers 1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed…
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Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
Practical accounting for fintech engineers, and also how not to repeat my silly mistakes.
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Agents need control flow, not more prompts
Thesis: reliable agents tackling complex tasks need deterministic control flow encoded in software, not increasingly elaborate prompt chains If you’ve eve...
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Eve Version 0
Today marks a huge milestone for us - the first public release of Eve . After a ton of research , dozens of prototypes, and a slew of tests we’ve finally come to something that we think is the beginning of Eve. It’s still in its infancy with lots missing and assuredly more than a few bugs, but it’s reached a point…
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Writing a video chat application from the ground up, part 1
What I cannot create, I do not understand. – Richard Feynman I do a lot of video chat for work. If it’s not a one on one, it’s pair programming. If it’s not pair programming…
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I wish my web server were in the corner of my room
Posted on Monday 10 Oct 2022. 1,417 words, 11 links. By Matt Webb.
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What Is a Harness?
An agent harness is a piece of software that provides an environment for an AI model to operate within.
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Succinct data structures
An overview of a class of data structures I didn't know about!
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Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
Which is good! Boring = success