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JVM Internals (2013)
Explains the internal architecture of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in simple terms using showing key components and how memory is updated during execution.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 808 posts.
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The insane amount of backward compatibility in Google Maps
I still keep a couple of my favorite old smartphones. Sometimes I use one of them as my primary device for fun. Phones are among the fastest evolving markets, even a year makes a whole lot of differences. One of the biggest challenges with using old phones is the software: they don't run modern software. And old…
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End-to-end implementation of a machine learning pipeline (2017)
In the fall of 2016, I was a Teaching Fellow (Harvard's version of TA) for the graduate class on "Advanced Topics in Data Science (CS209/109)" at Harvard University. I was in-charge of designing the class project given to the students, and this tutorial has been built on top of the project I designed for the class.
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Shipping a Neural Network on iOS with CoreML, PyTorch, and React Native
This is the story of how I trained a simple neural network to solve a well-defined yet novel challenge in a real iOS app. The problem is unique, but most of what I cover should apply to any task in any iOS app. That’s the beauty of neural networks.
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TypeScript at Google
What I've been working on the last few years.
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The Power of Prolog
Introduction to modern Prolog
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Oracle’s Java 11 trap
TL:DR; Java is still available at zero-cost , you just need to stop using Oracle JDK and start using an OpenJDK build, such as this one o...
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Learning to program is getting harder
I have written several books that use Python to explain topics like Bayesian Statistics and Digital Signal Processing. Along with the books...
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Why Aren't There C Conferences?
Most widely-used programming languages have at least one regular conference dedicated to discussing it. Heck, even Lisp has one . It’s a place to talk about the latest developments of the language, recent and upcoming standards, and so on. However, C is a notable exception. Despite its role as the foundation of the…
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Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
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NumPy Exercises for Data Analysis in Python
The goal of the numpy exercises is to serve as a reference as well as to get you to apply numpy beyond the basics. The questions are of 4 levels of difficulties with L1 being the easiest to L4 being the hardest.
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Software Testing Anti-patterns
There are several articles out there that talk about testing anti-patterns in the software development process. Most of them however deal with the low level details of the programming code, and almost always they focus on a specific technology or programming language.
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My adventures getting Disney’s Moana island scene to render well with Pbrt
Adventures in rendering the Moana island scene with pbrt, collected together for your convenience.
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Rust in 2018: easier to use
Rust in 2018: it's way easier to use!
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The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)
technology as if people mattered
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You can't Rust that
Some tips for how to be more productive in Rust by avoiding situations you cannot solve in Rust.
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Picking Apart the Crashing iOS String
So there’s yet another iOS text crash, where just looking at a particular string crashes iOS. Basically, if you put this string in any system text …
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Dijkstra's in Disguise
You can find a PDF version of this blog post here . A weighted graph is a data structure consisting of some vertices and edges, and each...
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Distributed architecture concepts I learned when building a large payment system
When building a large scale, highly available and distributed system, what architecture concepts do you need to use, in practice? In this post, I am summarizing ones I have found essential to learn and apply when building the payments system that powers Uber. This is a system with a load
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Falling in love with Rust
Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious…
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SQL Keys in Depth
The internet is full of dogmatic commandments for choosing and using keys in relational databases. At times it verges on a holy war: should you use natural or artificial keys? Auto-incrementing integers, UUIDs?
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How Google Code Search Worked: Regex Matching with a Trigram Index (2012)
In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a…
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Moving efficiently in the CLI
A cheatsheet for moving efficiently in the CLI!
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Designing very large JavaScript applications
Originally published on my blog Industrial Empathy.
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The Making of Underrun – A WebGL Shooter in 13kb of JavaScript
I participated in this year's js13kGames , a JavaScript game development competition with a file size limit of 13kb, including code, assets and everything else. My entry was Underrun , a twin stick shooter using WebGL.