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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
[2016-10-26] First version of the article [2016-10-28] Presentation at Soft-Shake Conference, Geneva ( slides ) [2016-11-01] Article and comments in The Register [2017-11-16] Presentation at Black Alps Security Conference, Yverdon ( slides ) [2018-03-09] Presentation at Toulouse Hacking Conference ( slides )…
I have an affinity for performance optimization and making software as efficient as possible. Over the years, I've encountered specific instances and common patterns that make software or computers slow. In this post, I'll shine a spotlight on some of them.
The second block has more real work going on. If the character stored in the variable _ does not match the first character of the string a , the code recurses in such a way that this same block of code will again be entered. That is, t=-65 forces a return to the if (t < -50) block. The recursion steps through string a…
I can't tell you how nice it is to have software in production on a boring stack. It gives you freedom to do other things.
It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in one of the largest lecture halls at my university. I’m a computer science major but I’m taking a course on natural history — plants and animals — as one of my electives.
This has been a ground-breaking year for my C skills, and paradigm shifts in my technique has provoked me to reconsider my habits and coding style. It’s been my largest personal style change in years, so I’ve decided to take a snapshot of its current state and my reasoning. These changes have produced significant…
Deno is a relatively new JavaScript runtime. I find it quite interesting and aesthetically appealing, in-line with the recent trend to rein in the worse-is-better law of software evolution. This post explains why.
I wrote a (list of) regular expressions that will play a (not very good) chess game by running a 2-ply minimax search.
Org Mode Syntax Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
26 CSS tips and tricks with live demos: text-overflow ellipsis, line-clamp, position: sticky, scroll snap, gradient text, CSS-only modals and tooltips.
Stop looking at Xcode. It's not fun. Unless it is! In which case, do it!
Demystify shaders with this beginner-friendly guide. Explore fragment shaders, signed distance functions, and metaballs through interactive code examples. Learn how to create beautiful blob animations and effects using just a few lines of code.
🖍️ Explaining multiple techniques for rendering outlines and highlights for real-time applications. This includes vertex object-space as well as screen-space methods. This can be used to render outlines in Unity or Unreal. Outlines can be used for gameplay reasons or aesthetics.
During interviews, technical skills in the industry are still largely vetted through LeetCode-style questions. These are small algorithmic riddles in the for...
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
The late 90s saw the emergence of Capcom in the world of arcades. The Osaka based company seemed to produce one hit after another with Ghouls'n Ghosts in 1988, Final Fight in 1989 and Street Fighter II in 1991 among a myriad of other excellent games.
There is more than enough written on the mechanics of and mitigations for the recent severe RCE in log4j . On prevention, this is the most interesting widely-reshared insight I have seen:
[Edit: Welcome Hacker News readers! Before we dive into the neat memory management esoterica, I want to briefly note that as engineers we have an ethical obligation in our work to consider the "safety, health, and welfare of the public" , because if we don't, terrible things happen . This is a challenging…
There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s , is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t realize that right before he started his run he hit a home run…
Good software knows what problem it solves and what needs to be tackled by another tool
Seth Michael Larson pointed out that the Python gzip module can be used as a CLI tool like this:
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
How Pi's minimal harness improves coding-agent cost and performance, with examples from Databricks and Shopify's pi-autoresearch extension.
VideoLAN announces dav2d, an open source AV2 decoder — continuing the work started with dav1d for AV1.
