Topics /

Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.

Any year
5971

Crafting container images without Dockerfiles

Last month I have been developing a Rust tool to create container images from Conda environments, without going through Docker. It was a wild trip down the rabbit hole of OCI images, so I thought I’d share part of the adventure here. Enjoy! But why? If you are used to building container images, you might be asking…

5973

Erlang/OTP 21's new logger

With OTP-21 came a new logging library in Erlang called logger . It comes as an attempt to offer a built-in alternative to long successful projects such as lager , which have seen years of battle testing and tweaking for performance. I've seen few articles written about the new logger and what it can do, so I've…

5975

Open-Sourcing Inform 7

This is a talk and slides from Narrascope 2019 , held at MIT, Boston, on 14-16 June 2019. It's a sequel to a talk given in London a year earlier , when I went into "literate programming" at greater depth, but when the design of Inter was more embryonic. I'd like to thank the Narrascope organisers for fitting me in to…

5984

Chiptunes on an ATtiny4 and the 3 Cent Micro

Ever since hearing about Rob Miles' Bitshift Variations in C Minor , a 4-voice polyphonic 16 minute piece of algorithmically generated music, I wanted to implement it in hardware. Getting it onto just any microcontroller seemed too easy , so I wanted it to run on the smallest µC I could find — the ATtiny4. A while…

5987

Reproducing Go binaries byte by byte

Fully reproducible builds are important because they bridge the gap between auditable open source and convenient binary artifacts. Technologies like TUF and Binary Transparency provide accountability for what binaries are shipped to users, but that’s of limited utility if there is no way (short of reverse engineering)…

5989

PyTorch – Internal Architecture Tour

Update 28 Feb 2019: I added a new blog post with a slide deck containing the presentation I did for PyData Montreal. Introduction Short intro to Python extension objects in C/C++ Zero-copy PyTorch Tensor to Numpy and vice-versa Tensor Storage Shared Memory DLPack: a hope for the Deep Learning frameworks Babel…

5997

Implement with types, not your brain (2019)

When asked about the virtues of Haskell’s strong type system, most people will say the best part is that it lets you refactor with a zen-like tranquility, or that it stops your program from crashing at runtime. I mean, those are both great. But my favorite part is that having a strong type system means I don’t need to…

5999

Programming is Art

When I started programming, my whole day revolved around development. I’d wake up, write code, and go to sleep. And that’s how it was day in and day out. My entire social circle consisted of people who also wrote code. I studied frameworks, libraries, and various programming languages.