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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
Introduction This is the first part of a series of blog posts I intend to write, whose aim will be to explain how garbage collection works in the real world (in particular, with the JVM). I will co…
This started out as a Hacker News comment about a blog post about select being fundamentally broken After that the same author wrote why epoll is broken as well. I don’t know what problem author is trying to solve but let’s pick this one:
Ever wanted to know what it's like to write a technical book? This post details my experience co-authoring an O'Reilly book with my colleagues Lak and Mike. Our book, Machine Learning Design Patterns, is available to order now and all royalties go to Girls Who Code.
Canvas drawing techniques with live demos: pencils and smooth connections, fur and pen brushes, bezier curves, sprays, patterns, and neighbor-point webs.
A couple weeks ago I made it to the FSF's 30th anniversary party. It was a blast in many ways, and a good generator of many fond memories, but I won't go into depth of them here. One particularly exciting thing that happened for me though was I got to meet Gerald Sussman (of SICP !) The conversation has greatly…
Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
An experienced project manager I used to work with claimed that he took the programmers’ time estimates, multiplied by pi and converted to the next time magnitude to get the true number. 1 day converts to 3.14 weeks. He had learned the hard way that programmers are bad at estimating times . To get a more precise…
Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t...
This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…
We are facing some interesting times at work as we are going to start changing our technology stack in the near future. Most of our Oracle ...
When OpenAI released their proof that solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up in finite time, they also released a formal proof in Lean 4.
Somehow people are still putting tiny libraries on npm, and it really needs to stop.
I recently worked on two different C projects, and I wanted to structure them in a way that would make them easy to maintain and understand. I also wanted to make sure that the projects were easy to build and test. In this post, I will share my experience and the best practices I found for structuring C projects.
To frugally furnish a codebase, imitate Ikea.
The article discusses how Kotlin can create internal languages and how developers can use this feature to write powerful domain-specific languages for manipulating untyped data structures in a typed manner.
In this article, I share a beginner friendly guide to learning the basics of embedded systems and how they work. I talk about micontrollers, electronics, and software. I also share my motivation for working on embedded systems.
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
Programming language memory models answer the question of what behaviors parallel programs can rely on to share memory between their threads. For example, consider this program in a C-like language, where both x and done start out zeroed.
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
About 10 years ago I wrote a post PostgreSQL for the Busy MySQL Developer, as part of switching from MySQL to Postgres for my personal and professional projects wherever I could.
People keep saying that a one line source code change should take one second to be “effective”. “Effective” meaning that you get some form…
Recently I’ve been working on a pretty big rust project and to my surprise Icouldn’t get tests to work properly.
Point-free programming (or point-less programming, for the more cynically inclined) is a paradigm that advocates the formulation of programs by means of function composition. In the point-free styl…
The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores – Lozi et al. 2016 This is the first in a series of papers from EuroSys 2016. There are three strands here: first of all, there’s some grea…
Article based on my talk about Full-text search in Django with PostgreSQL.
