Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,001 posts.
We use distributed systems every day in the form of internet services. These systems are very useful, but also challenging to implement because networks are unpredictable. Whenever you send a message over the network, it is likely to arrive quite quickly, but it’s possible that it might be delayed for a long time, or…
What did whiteboards ever do to you?
Verilog is the most commonly used language for hardware design in America (VHDL is more common in Europe). Too bad it's so baroque. If you ever browse the Verilog questions on Stack Overflow , you'll find a large number of questions, usually downvoted, asking “why doesn't my code work?”, with code that's not just a…
IDN, International Domain Names, is the concept that lets us register and use international characters in domain names, and by international we of course mean characters outside of the ASCII range. Recently I have fought some battles against IDN and IDN decoding so I felt this urge to write a lot of words about it ……
There haven’t been a lot of community structures or resources for Staff+ engineers. That’s changing.
Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…
While browsing twitter, I came across this tweet:
Background In 2015 I worked as a consultant at a large company in Lund. My position was with the build team and one of our responsibilities...
Wikipedia cites a few different sources on what “Unix Philosophy” is. Peter Salus summarizes it as:
The other day I was reading about the development of personal computers and the desktop GUI, and I was thinking about how comfortable we all have become with the analogy of the “desktop” for our personal computers. We place files in folders and keep them on our desktops. There’s a lot of physical action going on…
Emacs's buffers are so much more than their name implies. They're not just a vessel for you to read or write from. Buffers in Emacs host network processes, shells, and transient data. They're also a key part to understanding why Elisp is designed the way it is.
a bare minimum introduction to modern program synthesis
Trying out the Rust programming ecosystem as a 10+ years Python developer. How to do common programming tasks and how the tooling looks like.
There are some books which make you feel smarter just by having them on your shelf. This is one of them! I would consider it essential for anyone working with code - whether a wide-eyed newbie or grizzled veteran. How do human brains understand code? What neurological quirks do we all have? Which common mistakes can…
Here’s a thought question for today: why can’t database tables index themselves? Obviously, indexes are a central concept to databases and database performance. But horror tales still abound of naïve developers who “forget” to index their tables, and encounter massive performance and scalability problems down the road…
SQL is a language to handle data in databases. However, it has limitations and you might need to parse SQL to get around them.
sysctl is a simple and great tool for modifying the kernel parameters. It does its job very well by providing an easy-to-use interface for /proc/sys. It is maintained as a part of procps toolkit for years and it can easily be considered a legacy tool today. So why not push it to its limits and turn it into a more…
An advanced beginner's take on WebAssembly.
In this post, we will explore how to build a high-performance database buffer pool in Zig using io_uring's new fixed-buffer mode.
11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I've since scrubbed from my memory. But…
I'm normally a fan of the rigidity within the Go toolchain
I will try to solve all of the advent of code with as little human input as possible
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Emacs has a shell written entirely in Emacs Lisp. Here's how you master Eshell, a versatile and powerful shell capable of supplanting bash or zsh as your daily driver.
WebSocket (WS) connections are pretty neat. I’ve gotten to play around with them before, both for personal and professional projects, but my view has mostly been at a high level and concerned mainly with the things that I can build on top of them. I haven’t spent much time digging through the protocol. I thought it…
Happy with my recent breakthrough in understanding C integer divisions after weeks of struggle, I was minding my own business having fun writing integer arithmetic code. Life was good, when suddenly… zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) .
Hey! Target reached: Bragging time! I mean, this is the irregular Emacs update … stats … report… thing… So, I’m gamifying Emacs development by setting myself a goal of…
Today I got an email titled ‘Your Manuscript Account Balance’ which said: Your Manuscript account is now in arrears in the amount of $31.25. Use this link to specify a credit card for y…
