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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
Windows paths have been WTF-16 -encoded for decades, but module names in the import tables of Portable Executable are octets. If a name contains values beyond ASCII — technically out of spec — then the dynamic linker must somehow decode those octets into Unicode in order to construct a lookup path. There are multiple…
Silently sends up to 255 bytes of the client's heap to the server . The server must support NPN , and the heap data is encrypted in transit.
We get a closer-to-final look by applying custom palettes to the backgrounds.
A good programmer is someone who can write large programs that have a high probability of being correct.
I spent past three weeks working on refactoring and fixing legacy code…
Updated in 2025-09. The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I've previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. The format consists of…
In the words of its authors Bubble Tea is a “powerful little TUI framework” for Go. It may be little but I found it had a steep learning curve before I could get truly comfortable with its power. I spent many a late night wrangling with broken layouts and unresponsive keys before learning the hard way where I had gone…
Last week's article discussed how the Super Nintendo's Video system feeds the TV's CRT. Today I'll summarize what I understand of the hardware generating these graphics.
A comedic example, parked nicely on the thinnest wedge of the venn diagram, is the HamFurs – people who do amateur radio while wearing fur suits. While it isn't my cup of tea, I love that such a group exists. They seemed like nice people when I chatted to them.
"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do." I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles.
Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 1: Intro & Value Types
I wanted to explore different ways of communicating between different processes executing on the same machine, and doing so as fast as possible. We're focussing on high speed inter-process communication (IPC), but some of these approaches can be extended across a network. We'll do this exploration in Rust.
I was toying around with a refactor the other day that would have taken me ages by hand as it involved 100s of files. I wanted to rename every instance of...
I am a big fan of C, but some part of me always yearn to have just enough higher level constructs.
Unleash your creativity with the full power and Python, without the hassle of learning a new templating language or dealing with its limitations!
A few weeks ago, Axel Roest published a simple web server comparison , that turned out to not be doing what it was thought to be doing. Figuring that out was a very interesting discussion that warrants a retrospective, to look at which parts were particularly helpful and which not so much.
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
I have written about my on-going rewrite-it-to-Rust effort at work: 1 , 2 , 3 . And now it's finished, meaning it's 100% Rust and 0% C++ - the public C API has not changed, just the implementation, one function at time until the end. Let's have a look back at what worked, what didn't, and what can be done about it.
The Rust language has incrementally grown a set of patterns to support control-flow effects including error handling, iteration, and asynchronous I/O. In The registers of Rust , boats lays out four aspects of this pattern shared by Rust’s three effects. Today these effects are typically used in isolation, or at most…
Don't trust. Verify. I could not resist making a fake book cover Here follows a brief description on how you can detect if the curl package would ever make an xz. xz (and its library liblzma) was presumably selected as a target because it is an often used component and by extension via systemd it … Continue reading…
I am currently working on a Rust to .NET compiler, rustc_codegen_clr . To get it to work, I need to implement many Rust features using .NET APIs. One of such features is panicking and unwinding.
15 years ago (2007-2011) I was at Yahoo! working with Map/Reduce and Apache Pig, which was the better Map/Reduce at the time. The Dremel paper just came out and, as everything I worked with seemed to be inspired from Google papers, I read it. I could see it applying to what we were doing at Yahoo! and this was to…
dsp's personal site
Can I make math operations run 100x faster on really, really big numbers?
Yesterday John Graham-Cumming posted about “Steve Ballmer’s incorrect binary search interview question,” and in the Hacker News discussion, among the predictable “interview culture is flawed!!” complaints, there was some discussion of whether binary search was even the right way to solve Ballmer’s puzzle. Here’s a…
Some people make games using the Unreal Engine. That’s nice, but I wanted something a little different. That’s why I’m using the Real Engine.
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily ...
Whether you have to do with data in the form of CSV, JSON or a full-blooded programming language like C, JavaScript, Scala, or maybe a query language like SQL, you always transform some sequence of characters (or binary values) into a structured representation. Whatever you’ll do with that representation depends on…
🔰If CRDTs are new to you, here are some introductory links. - An interactive intro to CRDTs - An introduction to state-based CRDTs - CRDTs for non-academics - CRDT: The Hard Parts - Readings in CRDTs - crdt.tech What are the trade-offs between different kinds of CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated
