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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
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Hexadecimal clock counting down to 2038 problem
It is now ??????????.??? ( ????-??-??T??:??:??.???Z ) in Unix time , according to your local system clock.
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Pictures of a working garbage collector
C++, a "Reality sandwich", and an Octopus.
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Reverse Engineering the DualShock 4
This year I got a very special gift for Christmas: a broken DualShock 4. :smile:You may say it’s a relatively poor gift, but the person who gave me this know...
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How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years
Taking a software design course in college (Go Ducks!), we used Ed Yourdon (RIP) & Larry Constantine’s book Structured Design as a text.
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The History of Windows 2.0
Success and Litigation
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Emacs is not just an editor (2015)
Emacs is Not Just An Editor
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Building a front end framework – Reactivity, composability with no dependencies
Before I start—to set some context—by frontend framework what I mean is, a framework that allows us to avoid having to write regular old HTML and JavaScript such as this:
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Philosophy of Coroutines
I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…
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Building Boba AI: Lessons learnt in building an LLM-powered application
A series of patterns for building an AI co-pilot application.
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Notes on training BERT from scratch on an 8GB consumer GPU
I trained a BERT model (Devlin et al, 2019) from scratch on my desktop PC (which has a Nvidia 3060 Ti 8GB GPU). The model architecture, tokenizer, and trainer all came from Hugging Face libraries, and my contribution was mainly setting up the code, setting up the data (~20GB uncompressed text), and leaving my computer…
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A ChatGPT Emacs Shell
UPDATE: has evolved a bit and is now on MELPA. I had been meaning to give ChatGPT a good try, preferably from Emacs. As an eshell fan, ChatGPT seemed ...
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Git branches are named sequences of commits
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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32 MiB Working Sets on a 64 GiB machine
Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. Ho…
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A guide to closures in Rust
Understand how closures really work in Rust
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I fixed a bug the other day
I fixed a bug that was in production for 2 years with a few lines of code.
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Not knowing the /proc file system
Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…
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The saga of the Closure compiler, and why TypeScript won
This post looks at the Closure Compiler, Google's tool from the mid-2000s for adding types to JavaScript. It looks at how its focus on minification led to very different design choices than TypeScript, and how this and a few other factors led to TypeScript becoming the ubiquitous solution for JavaScript + types. The…
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The pull request hack is fucking magic
I don't have time to keep up with all the daft Open Source projects I release. I wish my skill and my energy was as wide as my ambition. Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer's Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple - if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them…
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Chinchilla’s death
“With more careful calculations, one can win; with less, one cannot” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War .
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Squeezing a Sokoban game into 10 lines of Haskell
Call-by-push-block
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Why use Rust on the back end?
I don't care about avoiding GC or about maximum performance. I treat Rust as a high level language.
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How did people deal with punch cards?
In the fall of 1976 I started as a Freshman at SUNY Stony Brook intending to major in Math and Computer Science. I took Honors Calculus I a...
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Time is not a synchronization primitive
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Why Do ML on the Erlang VM?
Another question might be; why do machine learning at all? I'm not big into ML/AI though I've been poking it more recently as the open models, such as Stable Diffusion and the more practical Whisper, caught my curiosity. I have a very decent GPU (3090 Ti) and I've poked around a bit. I don't consider ML a super…
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Driving Compilers
I remember how pleasant it was to learn to program in C. There were so many good books explaining not only the language but also the standard library. I devoured both The C Programming Language (K&R) by Kernighan/Ritchie and The Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger. Then came Expert C Programming by Van der Linden and…
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Ruby's hash is a Swiss-army knife
This article shows the obscure but useful capabilities of Hash, a simple but equally powerful data structure in Ruby.
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The curious case of a memory leak in a Zig program
Digs into a unexpected memory leak when using Zig's FixedBufferAllocator