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A Git Horror Story: Repository Integrity With Signed Commits
(Note: This article was written at the end of 2012 and is out of date. I will update it at some point, but until then, please keep that in perspective.)
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Delete an inline function, save 794 kB
In the previous episode of “Simple Changes to Shrink Chrome” I discussed how deleting ‘const’ from a few key locations could lead to dramatic size savings, due to a VC++ com…
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One-pass Compiler
A one-pass compiler emits assembly (or binary code) right during parsing, without creating an intermediate representation, such as an AST. This is a rare technique that was used back in the days when computer memory was scarce. This limited both the language features that were possible and the quality of the produced…
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Say hello to x64 Assembly, part 1
Introduction There are many developers between us. We write a tons of code every day. Sometime, it is even not a bad code :) Every of us ...
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Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another eng
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Hello world in C inline assembly (2018)
A C program that writes "hello, world!" to the console using inline assembly instead of standard library functions, demonstrating direct system call invocation.
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Indirection Is Not Abstraction
The concept of abstraction in software development is frequently misunderstood and confused with indirection. This is partially because of the keywords abstract and interface in statically-typed la...
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Parsing integers quickly with AVX-512
If I give a programmer a string such as "9223372036854775808" and I ask them to convert it to an integer, they might do the following in C++: std::string s = .... uint64_t val; auto [ptr, ec] = std::from_chars(s.data(), s.data() + s.size(), val); if (ec != std::errc()) {} // I have an error ! // val … Continue reading…
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How to Create Your Own Git Server
Although I'm a happy (also paying) user of GitHub's offerings, there are times when I prefer to host a private repository on a server I control. Setting up your own Git server can be useful if you're isolated from the public internet, if you're subject to inflexible regulations, or if you simply want features…
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Broken Ownership
In the ownership trio, we discussed 3 elements: Knowledge, Mandate and Responsibility. This article digs into various broken ownership scenarios where 1-2 of those elements are missing, what are the common symptoms and how to fix them.
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4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle
And its sibling slime-js-jack-in-browser are some conveniences that I've built around slime-js. You can find them here in my .emacs.d on github.
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Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python
Introduction Today’s post will take us in a slightly different direction than the last few. Today’s post will be about hooking up some Python code to the X-Plane flight simulator to enable development of an autopilot using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers. I’ve been a fan of flight simulators for…
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Rendering Moana with Swift
Moana (2048×858 pixels, 64 spp) rendered with Gonzales on a Google Cloud Instance with 8 vCPUs and 64GB of memory in roughly 26 hours. Memory usage is about 60GB. (Denoised with OpenImageDenoi…
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A Breakdown of HTTP Clients in Elixir
This is an overview of the HTTP clients we have available in Elixir, as well as when to use each one.
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Lindenmayer systems
A Lindemayer system or LSystem for short consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial “axiom” string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into…
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Inserting 130M SQLite rows per minute from a scripting language
The other week, I stumbled on the post Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute , which was a funny coincidence, as I was just in...
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Scheme Is a Hoot
Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…
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Verifying distributed systems with Isabelle/HOL
We use distributed systems every day in the form of internet services. These systems are very useful, but also challenging to implement because networks are unpredictable. Whenever you send a message over the network, it is likely to arrive quite quickly, but it’s possible that it might be delayed for a long time, or…
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Simple Physics-based Flight Simulation with C++
Creating simple but realistic physics-based flight simulations from scratch with C++ and OpenGL.
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In defense of coding interviews
What did whiteboards ever do to you?
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My worst tech interview experience
Everyone in tech seems to have a “terrible tech interview” story. The topic quietly orbits in the ether of our industry and periodically bursts through the a...
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Verilog Is Weird
Verilog is the most commonly used language for hardware design in America (VHDL is more common in Europe). Too bad it's so baroque. If you ever browse the Verilog questions on Stack Overflow , you'll find a large number of questions, usually downvoted, asking “why doesn't my code work?”, with code that's not just a…
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Big Ball of Mud (1999)
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD