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Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement
In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, at approximately 14:20 in the interview, he made a quick point about…
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
602
Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer
One day a coworker mentioned that he was thinking about APIs for distributed compute clusters and I jokingly responded “clearly the ideal API would be simply calling telefork() and your process wakes up on every machine of the cluster with the return value being the instance ID”. I ended up captivated by this idea: I…
603
A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack
A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.
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Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically
This is Part 1 of a series of posts. Part 2 is available here: Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically It is well-known that writing a good VM for a dynamic language is never an easy job. High
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Good Tools Are Invisible
TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool's shortcomings and reselling them as a "puzzle game" which is "fun" to solve.I don't want my tools to be "fun". I want my tools to be invisible.Text…
608
Four Column ASCII
I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four column version of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to repost this here so it is easier to discover.
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It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)
(A true story.) Philip (President): Our factory is underutilized by 10%. Either we start building more of our backlog or we lay people off. I'd rather keep everyone busy, build inventory, and get...
611
Why Use Postgres?
Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more…
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IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior
(Screenshot by someone on Twitter two weeks ago. I can’t find the tweet now — sorry.)
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OS X Command Line Utilities
The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you’re migrating from Linux, you’ll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren’t aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system. Learning about…
615
Ten Years of Erlang
For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.
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The blissful Zen of a good side project
One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.
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The Yaml document from hell
As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.
620
A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
621
Undocumented Catalina file access change
It's well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I've discovered that on Catalina, pasting a…
622
Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
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Graphics for JVM
Introducing Skija, Java bindings for Google graphics library, Skia
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About Python 3
Python community, friends, fellow developers, we need to talk. On December 3rd, 2008 Python 3.0 was first released. At the time it was widely said that Python 3 adoption was going to be a long process, it was referred to as a five year process. We’ve just passed the five year mark.
626
The Future of JavaScript MVCs
often devs still approach performance of JS code as if they are riding a horse cart but the horse had long been replaced with fusion reactor
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Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs
Graphical artifacts caused by a CPU, not GPU? Sure thing.
628
The computers are fast, but you don't know it
The computers are fast but you don't know it: Speeding up your Python functions with Cython & C++
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HTML is the Web
In which I lament the fact that many frontend Web engineers don't understand the end product of their work, HTML.
630
Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go
I have always wanted to write an emulator. I made a half-hearted attempt in college but it never made it to a demo-able state. I also didn't want to write Yet Another Emulator. It should at least bring something new to the table. When I discovered LLVM , I felt like I finally had worthwhile idea for a project.