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Complex game worlds, simple text interfaces (2015)
UPDATE July 2021: 6 years later, there’s a game and also an updated explainer video .
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,020 posts.
572
Don't use functions as callbacks unless they're designed for it
…same goes for option objects.
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Julia's multiple dispatch explained with Pokemons
T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…
575
Some useful regular expressions for programmers
In my blog post, My programming setup, I stressed how important regular expressions are to my programming activities. Regular expressions can look intimidating and outright ugly. However, they should not be underestimated. Someone asked for examples of regular expressions that I rely upon. Here a few. It is commonly…
576
Branchless Coding in Go
So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…
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Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained
Engineering and thoughts.
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581
GTK4 for Graphical User Interfaces
This book gives an introduction to design and creation of graphical user interfaces using the GTK widget tool-kit and the Nim programming language. The book has its focus on the Linux operating system (OS). While the Nim programming language does support all major operating systems, GTK has it main emphasis on the…
582
Software designers, not engineers: An interview from alternative universe
How very different the world of software is in an alternative universe which has software designers rather than software engineers? In this interview, we look at a range of topics from software design sketching to software designer education, as well as the way in which software designers reshape any problem they are…
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A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp (2017)
A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp
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System Design Interview book review
I've come across the book System Design Interview: an Insider's Guide by accident (paperback book [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CMF2CQF], and online course [https://bytebytego.com/]). I was looking for good book resources after several people have been asking me how they can get better at building
585
Collision Detection Is Hard: The Story of Alf
Today we’re talking about ALF. It’s a surprising move for Nicole Express; we do not condone cat-eating. But neither did Alf, eventually. In any case, we’re n...
586
What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?
Current ideas about the best way of building a software system are heavily influenced by the ideas that captured the attention of previous generations of developers. Can anything of practical use be learned from studying long gone techniques for building software systems?
587
Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years
This week’s paper won the distinguished presentation award at HotOS 2021, and discusses the potential for future innovation in the tool that many use every day - the shell! A previous submission of this paper on Hacker News elicited a number of strong reactions. One reaction was the assertion that there are in fact…
588
Rust programs written entirely in Rust
A blog by sunfishcode
589
Thousands of Debian packages updated from their upstream Git repository
The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the…
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Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem
I've built an app called Fork Freshness . In the process of building that app, I've learned some interesting things about how open source projects evolve over time.
591
Anti-patterns when building container images
This is a list of recurring anti-patterns that I see when I help folks with their container build pipelines, and suggestions to avoid them or refactor them into something better.
592
Fast CSV Processing with SIMD
I recently learned of csvquote , a tool that encodes troublesome CSV characters such that unix tools can correctly process them. It reverses the encoding at the end of the pipeline, recovering the original input. The original implementation handles CSV quotes using the straightforward, naive method. However, there’s a…
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Idioms for the D Programming Language
Effective D Programming Language.
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Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy
Ship/Show/Ask is a branching strategy that helps teams wait less and ship more, without losing out on feedback.
597
Reflecting on Four Years at Databricks
Today marks my 4th year anniversary at my current employer, Databricks. It's been a good run, and this is a great chance to reflect on the journey so far. This post is as much for me to organize my own thoughts as it is for anyone else to read.
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0x7FDE623822FC16E6: A magic constant for double float reciprocal (2011)
EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much interest. Just to be clear, using the constant is a very bad idea in almost every situation I can think of. Even instructions like RCPSS should only be used by people who are convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it (or don’t have any other choice). Subtracting from…
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Trie in JavaScript: The data structure behind autocomplete
We've already covered the basics of tree data structure in three posts. If you haven't gone through those yet, I would strongly going through the…
600
Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000)
It turns out my hopes were answered. First, Prechelt published another article that covers Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx. Also, Ron Garret (nee Erann Gat) did a follow-up study in which he asked programmers to write Prechelt's test program in Lisp. His results show that the resulting Lisp programs ran faster on average…