Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
I really like this quote from Jeff Bezos: “Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” Lately I have been thinking about wha…
For more experienced functional programmers, most of this post will seem introductory, but I introduce some more advanced stuff near the end. Functional Programming over Canadian Programming Lately, I've been thinking about this Functional Programming journey I've been on. I thought it started when I was twenty, but
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Order by in aggregates, better string concatenation, and thorough date formatting.
Lately, my Magit buffer broke once again because of something weird going on with major mode, and I couldn’t stash or commit hunks unless the point was at the beginning of the line. That once again reminded me that Emacs UI is not really a UI, all of it is mere text with a bunch of properties slapped on top.
A simple, whitespace theme for academics. Based on [*folio](https://github.com/bogoli/-folio) design.
A simple hash table implementation in C, by Leo Robinovitch.
In this article I will take a look at the classic concurrent ring buffer and how it can be optimized to increase throughput.
Note: The focus of this article is to explain the process of reverse engineering, and it is not continually updated to reflect ongoing changes in Facebook APIs. If you are looking for updated details, consider basing your work on open-source projects like mautrix/meta , which is developed by my employer Beeper .
A small Figma war story.
When you think about the Fibonacci sequence, you probably imagine a swirling vortex of oscillating points stretching outwards to infinity: Okay, no, obviously you don’t. Yet.
Tailwind CSS is the new ubiquitous frontend framework. It replaces a generation of sites built with Twitter Bootstrap. However, Tailwind CSS is not a UI framework itself but has become synonymous to some degree with t...
One of the primary things that people don't understand about Objective-C is that it is a solution of the two language problem , or more prec...
C++ is late to the coroutine party, compared to other programming languages, but they are part of C++20. Prior to coroutines, a C++ programmer had two choices, roughly speaking:
Ruby's switch statement is very versatile and flexible, especially due to the dynamic nature of Ruby. This post shows how it works with examples.
On January 17th 2023, X41 and Gitlab published a report of the source code audit they performed on Git (funded by the OSTIF foundation).
Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design. Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit…
Goroutines are the single feature that distinguishes Go from other languages. They look very much like threads, but they are cheap to create and manage. Go's runtime schedules goroutines onto real threads efficiently so you can easily create lots of goroutines.
I was lucky enough to grow up through the early 2000’s, during the golden age of Half-Life mods. Industry classics like Counter-Strike (CS) had just been invented, every month brought new mods to try, and files were too big to download on a dial-up connection so you’d leech them off a server at a big local LAN party…
“lex and yacc” are two terms that are used together so often that they can seem indivisible. lex takes a string as input and divides it up into lexemes (roughly speaking “words”) and yacc takes a sequence of lexemes and parses them. Since some parsing approaches such as recursive descent parsing unify these phases…
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
Knuth knows how to maintain information hygeine.
Research on programming tools published at CHI 2023.
CRDTs sound cool, but how are they actually used? Let's learn by building a collaborative pixel art editor.
UPDATE: Wow, this post has gotten popular! I’ve written a new post that adds new papercuts combined with concrete suggestions for how C++ could improve, if you are interested. Also, if you want to read more about C++’s deeper-than-papercut issues, I recommend specifically my post on its move semantics. Thank you for…
I'm sick of it. In the world of mobile development (though likely also elsewhere), we sink so much engineering talent into making tools that are great...
Fast Fibonacci Computations With a Linear Algebra Twist
This function doesn't know the value being multiplied until it is called. The compiler (gcc, O2) emits a generic integer multiply instruction in its loop body.
