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Features of a dream programming language
Update: Be sure to read the improved 2nd draft of this article instead. The following content is the...
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,020 posts.
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I just want to run this one Python script
So I couldn't sleep the other night, and my brain wanted to think about odd problems… Ever had a script that's compatible with both, Python 2 and 3, but you didn't want to bother the user to know whic
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Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
Far too many developers use Git without understanding it. It's time to straighten out your thinking about what Git is, and isn't.
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How to average floating point numbers (2015)
When it comes to accuracy, how you add a series of arbitrary values together, and average them still matters.
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The Database Inside Your Codebase
Navigating codebases of any meaningful size is difficult. Most of a programmer's time is spent jumping through the codebase, reading or skimming to build a ment...
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MIT Scheme on Apple Silicon
Instructions for compiling and running MIT/GNU Scheme.
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Tools I use: PyCharm / Idea plugins
List of all the plugins I use in PyCharm and Idea.
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Animated guide to Symex: Emacs structural editing with Lisp
[This is about Symex.el , the Emacs extension for structural editing with Lisp. If you are unfamiliar with Symex, you could read the post introducing it , or TL;DR: just know that “symex” is short for Lisp symbolic expression / S-expression, and this extension provides a full-featured modal interface / Evil state for…
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Smooth Voxel Terrain, Part 2 (2012)
Last time we formulated the problem of isosurface extraction and discussed some general approaches at a high level. Today, we’re going to get very specific and look at meshing in particular.…
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Decompressing a Gzip File by Hand
2024 Update: Part 2 is out! Let’s make a gzipped file and see what’s in it. We’ll keep it simple: just write 8 ‘a’s to a file. $ echo "aaaaaaaa" > test.out $ xxd test.out 00000000: 6161 6161 6161 6161 0a aaaaaaaa. As we can see, our file is 9 bytes long. We have 8 ‘a’ bytes written, plus a Line Feed (LF) character…
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Obvious and possible software innovations
There are a number of things that people theoretically know how to do, but which aren’t possible because of how software gets made. Some of these are almost forgotten, but there are at least …
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Calling Rust from Python using PyO3
speed up your Python using Rust
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A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View
Say you run an online book store and want to build a data pipeline that figures out who the top-selling authors are. Logically, the input to the pipeline is a log of every individual book purchase on the store for all time, along with details about each book like who authored it. And the output is a list of the…
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It Doesn't Work
8 AM. Like any other day, I take a quick glance at my GitHub notifications via Octobox.
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Avoid Git LFS if possible
I have long held the opinion that you should avoid Git LFS if possible. Since people keeping asking me why, I figured I'd capture my thoughts in a blog post so I have something to refer them to.
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Git as a NoSql Database (2016)
Git’s man-pages state that it’s a stupid content tracker. It’s probably the most used version control system in the world. Which is very strange, since it doesn’t describe itself as being a source control system. And in fact, you can use git to track any
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Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars
How to turn 256 bits of entropy into a beautiful, avatar-friendly circular SVG: the Hashvatar.
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Local man switches to Arch, tells no one
Yesterday, at approximately 5:05pm, a Seattle area man installed Arch Linux on his home computer and has yet to tell anyone.
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A brief introduction to esoteric programming languages
This is the companion reference for A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Languages, my lecture for a friend’s college class. The video should be legible to other viewers, and the material here should be (mostly) understandable without watching the video. The Esolangs Listed roughly in order of appearance in the talk, with…
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I got nerd sniped into benchmarking legacy x86 instructions (2019)
How I got nerd sniped into benchmarking legacy x86 instructions
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What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis (2016)
What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis De Rossi & Jackson Onward! 2013 We finished up last week talking about the how to find good concepts / abstractions in a software desig…
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Behold z, the unsung jewel that rethinks shell navigation
I spend a fair amount of time wandering around in the terminal. The chances are that you are too since you dared to open this story. My daily activities led me …
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What I learned from Erlang about resiliency in systems design (2019)
Failure in computer systems is inevitable. Adopting Erlang's philosophy of "Let it crash" at the many layers of abstractions in software can have a huge positive impact on resiliency.
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OpenBSD's Pledge and Unveil from Python
Years ago, OpenBSD gained two new security system calls, pledge(2) (originally tame(2) ) and unveil . In both, an application surrenders capabilities at run-time. The idea is to perform initialization like usual, then drop capabilities before handling untrusted input, limiting unwanted side effects. This feature is…
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Things I learned writing my first technical book
A hundred things I learned writing my first technical book “Data-Oriented Programming”
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Object-Oriented Entity-Component-System Design
About two months ago, I decided to start developing a fresh codebase for my voxel project – something that many indie developers are probably all-too familiar with, including myself. This time around, there were three major features that I wanted to implement:
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Write an SQL query builder in 150 lines of Python
This is the fourth article in a series about writing my own SQL query builder. Today, we'll rewrite it from scratch, explore API design, learn when to be lazy, and look at worse and better ways of doing things – all in 150 lines of Python!
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C++20 Concepts: The Definitive Guide
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