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Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus)
A few thoughts you're free to ignore
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,001 posts.
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What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings (2011)
If you are dealing with text in a computer, you need to know about encodings. Period. Yes, even if you are just sending emails. Even if you are just receiving emails. You don't need to understand every last detail, but you must at least know what this whole "encoding" thing is about. And the good news first: while the…
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Index Merges vs. Composite Indexes in Postgres and MySQL
Composite indexes aka multi-column indexes are about 10x faster than index merges. In Postgres, the gap is larger than in MySQL because Postgres doesn’t support index-only scans for queries that involve index merges.
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Transformers for software engineers
Ever since its introduction in the 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need, the Transformer model architecture has taken the deep-learning world by storm. Initially introduced for machine translation, it has become the tool of choice for a wide range of domains, including text, audio, video, and others. Transformers…
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-h –Help -help Help –? –?
-h --help -help help --? -? ????
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Java Development on an Apple M1 – A One Year Review
Collection of pitfalls, tips & tricks, and workarounds for Java development on an Apple M1 processor (ARM64): Testcontainers, Docker, Testing
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Solving Common Problems with Kubernetes
A storytelling guide to starting k8s
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What's new in Ruby 3.1?
Nithin Bekal's blog about programming - Ruby, Rails, Vim, Elixir.
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WebAssembly Is Not A Stack Machine
This is the final part of a 4-part miniseries on issues with WebAssembly and proposals to fix them.
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How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022
Between 2016 and 2020 I wrote a series of blog posts called “How to speed up the Rust compiler”. These were mostly about my work on the Rust compiler, plus some updates on the progress on the Rust compiler’s speed in general.
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Ten years against division of labor in software
"Software libraries suck. Here's why, in a sentence: they promise to be abstractions, but they end up becoming services. An abstraction frees you from thinking about its internals every time you use it. A service allows you to never learn its internals. A service is not an abstraction. It isn't 'abstracting' away the…
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Literate programming is much more than just commenting code
Most programmers haven’t heard of literate programming , and the few that have tend to think it means writing a lot of comments around your code. However, simply explaining code with prose, does not constitute literate programming. Consider the following quote from it’s inventor:
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A guide to error handling in Rust
The first half introduces Rust’s language features and libraries for error handling. The second half should help you write good error handling code in Rust.
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The self-fulfilling prophecy of React
The only thing React is better at than other front-end frameworks is being popular. So how long will that self-perpetuating cycle continue?
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HTML is all you need to make a website
In a world full of JavaScript frameworks, SPAs, CSS animations, powerful devices and fast internet, HTML-only websites are controversial and divisive. But why?
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A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs
The Threading library Starting in Emacs 26 some very ambitious changes were added. Basic thread support was enabled, laying the groundwork for a future concurrent emacs. The docs layout this possibility: Emacs Lisp provides a limited form of concurrency, called threads. All the threads in a given instance of Emacs…
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Zig-style generics are not well-suited for most languages
A discussion of some of the downsides of Zig
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Midnight Commander Tips and Tricks
A good tutorial can be found at Midnight Commander Guide . There is a mail list for MC in which you can ask questions and share tips: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc/ . There at least a half-dozen of entry level tutorial for Mc on the Web including several YouTube videos (just search for Midnight commander on…
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Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
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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The case of the mysterious --help directory (2020)
For quite some time—as my research will show, March 2016—, I have been annoyed by a directory named --help showing up in my home directory (and sometimes in others).
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Using Firecracker and Go to run short, untrusted code execution jobs (2021)
A concrete use-case of Firecracker with code snippets
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Software Engineering: The Soft Parts
Today I will share some of the software engineering soft skills I have learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering...
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Some Thoughts on Zig
One of the biggest things Zig has going for it—especially compared to Rust—is that it is (relatively) small. That sits in tension with Rust’s approach to solving memory safety problems, and sets up a nice challenge for future programming language designers.
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Why am I excited about WebAssembly?
As it continues to evolve, WebAssembly has the potential to be the platform executing an enormous amount of IoT computation.
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Buffers on the Edge: Python and Rust
One of my least favorite kinds of bug is when two different systems are interacting and the result has bad behavior but it’s difficult to say which (if either!) system is at fault. This is one of those stories, about Python’s buffer protocol and Rust’s memory model.