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The Prime That Wasn’t
Life, technology, and other good things
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Decorator JITs: Python as a DSL
Spend enough time looking at Python programs and packages for machine learning, and you'll notice that the "JIT decorator" pattern is pretty popular. For example, this JAX snippet:
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My 8 hour journey to a single character
I came into work on day not too long and was met with an unfortunate piece of information. The test we ran the previous night reported a 4% drop in accuracy (we found 4% fewer faces). I frowned. I had clearly screwed something up.
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Three kinds of memory leaks
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak. But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad categories, each with somewhat different…
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Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen
Minecraft generates unique worlds with Perlin noise. Covers the algorithm, octaves, and Fractal Brownian Motion - with a terrain implementation walkthrough.
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Ydiff: Structural Comparison of Programs
(Click on the above picture to see it in action. See the end of the post for more demos) Motivation I have been imagining a world where programs are not represented as text, but as data structures.…
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Number theory explained from first principles
A lot of modern cryptography builds on insights from number theory, which has been studied for centuries.
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Build Doom3 on MacOSX with XCode4
The source code of Doom3 has been released three days ago :) ! I have started to read it and I will probably write a code review if enough people are interested. According to the README.txt the source code is building well with Visual Studio 2010 but it is not building at all on Mac OS X with XCode 4.0 ( it is…
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This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Visualizing Delaunay Triangulation
Take a look at this: This is a triangulation of a set of random points, such that all the points are connected to one another, all of the faces are triangles, and the edges include the convex hull of the points. I would like to claim that this is not a very “good” triangulation. This algorithm tends to produce lots of…
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Get a Life
When I was a kid, I wrote a BASIC program to explore Conway’s Game of Life on my 8088. It was painfully slow, so I began an assembly rewrite. But I failed at Life: I abandoned the project in frustration because I kept freezing up my system.
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An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
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Unpacking Elixir: Observability
Elixir supports the usual supects of observability. Open Telemetry (OTel), log handlers, capturing metrics. And it does it well. This post will mostly focus on the observability you have on the BEAM that is either incredibly rare to see elsewhere or possibly entirely unique.
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How LZ4 works (2016)
LZ4 is an exciting algorithm, but unfortunately there is no good explanation on how it works. This blog post tries to explain it in terms that everybody can understand.
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To save C, we must save ABI
After that first Firebrand of an article on Application Binary Interface (ABI) Stability, I’m not sure anyone expected this to be the title of the next one, huh? It seems especially bad,
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Displaying My Washing Machine's Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth
A couple of months ago our washing machine produced a considerable quantity of smoke when I opened its door, which I interpreted as a suggestion that a replacement was needed. After rummaging around the internet for advice, a couple of days later a new Miele washing machine took its place in our home.
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Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus)
A few thoughts you're free to ignore
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Catching use-after-move C++ bugs with Clang's consumed annotations
This post describes a compile-time technique for catching use-after-move bugs in modern C++. It’s currently used to prevent some mistakes in the Serenity Operating System.
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I hate: Programming Wayland applications
If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central…
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Java JIT vs. Java AOT vs. Go for Small, Short-Lived Processes
Mario Macias' handcrafted blog
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Java is still available at zero-cost
The Java ecosystem has always been built on a high quality $free (zero-cost) JDK available from Oracle, and previously Sun. This is as true...
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C: Simple Defer, Ready to Use
With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use C’s future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.
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Ban 1+N in Django
I always thought of 1+N as a thing that you just keep in your head, catch on code reviews or via performance regressions. This worked well for a long …
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Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good?
I care about Bun. I have been rooting for it since the initial release in 2022. I switched all my development from Node to Bun. I used it in the development of the Nue framework and now with my new project Hertta .
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CSS in JavaScript is like replacing a broken screwdriver with your favorite hammer
There's a ton of interest these days in 'CSS in JS'. The premise is simple: CSS operates in a global namespace, which can result in undesirable side effects, spaghetti code, and extremely difficult to maintain codebases. JavaScript used to do this, and we fixed it by encapsulating everything in modules and using tools…