Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
I sit next to a window at work. On sunny days it’s easier to see a light editor theme, and when the sky is dark, a dark theme is easier on my eyes. So I decided to try to have my MacBook automatically switch the Emacs theme based on readings from the ambient light sensor.
In 1998, I published a book called Purely Functional Data Structures . Ten years later, the book is still selling well. (Every time I get ...
Targets web, native android, ios, and desktop!
A post describing how C programs get to the main function. Devicetree layouts, linker scripts, minimal C runtimes, GDB and QEMU, basic RISC-V assembly, and other topics are reviewed along the way.
My aim here is to test my understanding of Karpathy’s great blog post “Hacker’s guide to Neural Networks” as well as of Python, to get a hang of which I rece...
In this second installment of the machine learning from scratch we switch the point of view from regression to classification: instead of estimating a number, we will be trying to guess which of 2 possible classes a given input belongs to. A modern example is looking at a photo and deciding if its a cat or a dog.
In Effective Modern C++ , one of the explanations I have in Item 7 ("Distinguish between () and {} when creating objects") is this: If ...
Update 8/21: I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about issues with these rankings from comments, and have tried to address some of them here. The data there has been updated to include confidence…
Wouldn't it be nice if more JSON tools supported a truly pretty JSON format? Demand options for truly pretty JSON now! Viva la revolucion!
Frost Ming's personal blog
Two years ago, I wrote a post with a handful of grievances about Rust , a language that I then (and still) consider my favorite compiled language.
My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.
How to build great websites with htmx by learning a couple browser features alongside it.
I fixed a bug that was in production for 2 years with a few lines of code.
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is…
"Use the right tool" is nice in theory, but not when the tool acts a bit differently from machine to machine, and isn't always installed.
Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…
Bootstrap 4 and Foundation 6 are the latest versions of the most widely used CSS frameworks out there. Foundation 6 is stable whereas Bootstrap 4 hasn’t been released yet. However, before you wonder why I am comparing a stable framework version vs an alpha one, let me set the record straight by saying that Bootstrap 4…
It is always nice to follow a detailed guide and steps when building new rails apps. Below is a bit of guidance and step-by-step…
There is a subreddit /r/nononoyes for videos of things that look like they’ll go horribly wrong, but amazingly turn out ok.
A breakdown of how I used modern AI tools (Veo 3.1 and Nano Banana) to create a new version of a Google cultural classic.
This post looks at the Closure Compiler, Google's tool from the mid-2000s for adding types to JavaScript. It looks at how its focus on minification led to very different design choices than TypeScript, and how this and a few other factors led to TypeScript becoming the ubiquitous solution for JavaScript + types. The…
Don't "let it crash". Let it heal.
