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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,001 posts.

2022
723

What Is Rust's Unsafe? (2019)

I’ve seen a lot of misconceptions around what the unsafe keyword means for the utility and validity of Rust and its marketing as a “safe systems language”. The truth is a lot more complicated than a single pithy tweet can possibly sum up, unfortunately; here it is as I see it.

725

How to JIT – An Introduction

When I wrote the introductory article for libjit , I aimed it at programmers who know what JITs are, at least to some extent. I did mention what a JIT is, but only very briefly. The purpose of this article is to provide a better introductory overview of JITing, with code samples that don't rely on any libraries.

731

Emacs on an iPad

With my iPad having replaced my MacBook, the last thing I was missing was Emacs , which I not only enjoy hacking on, but is also how update my blog and resume! Let’s just say that it’s an integral tool in my life which I wanted access to, and I managed to make it happen.

733

Text consoles and framebuffer consoles in Linux

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…

734

Efficient simulation through linear algebra

I spent a lot of time working on a project in which physically plausible simulation of soft materials with pressure chambers was a key part, and in doing so, we managed to improve a part of our simulation by a significant amount. I was very happy with how this small part of the whole system turned out, and I've been…

735

I like Odin

As someone who is interested in systems programming, and has experience working with Go, but not with C or C++1, The Odin language is a great fit. Proper systems language Odin is a systems langauge…

740

Types of events in event-driven systems

Event-driven systems come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The obvious commonality is; they all use events to communicate information. These events come in many shapes and sizes, and determining what goes into an event has an immense impact on the design of your system.

742

The Algorithm for Hard Problems: Shake and Pull Gently

(Or, “regularized greedy algorithms and their applications.”) James Gilles “Algorithm” is one of those words that sounds fancier than it really deserves. We hear all the time about the “facebook algorithm”, the “youtube algorithm”, “high frequency trading algorithms”, “artificial intelligence algorithms”, and so on…

746

Adventures in Advent of Code

I’ve been participating regularly in Advent of Code for the past couple of years. It’s one of the highlights of my holiday season. The puzzles are fun, the stories are appropriately ridiculous, and it’s a neat way for me to keep the cobwebs brushed off some of the things I learned years ago that I don’t regularly use…