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Basic Type-Level Programming in Haskell
Dependently typed programming is becoming all the rage these days.Advocates are talking about all the neat stuff you can do by putting more and more informat...
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
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UEFI Programming – First Steps (2009)
In this article, I will describe steps needed to start on with development of real UEFI applications on x86 PC, and share some practical experiences with problems doing so. I will focus on 64-bit version of UEFI, because the 32-bit version isn't much used in this area (most likely due to Microsoft decision not to…
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“Security problems are primarily just bugs”
People are debating this email from Linus Torvalds (maintainer of the Linux kernel). It has strong language, like: Some security people ...
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Cross platform GUIs and Nim macros
A while ago I read John Novaks great rant on how hard and annoying it can be to do something as simple as extending a cross-platform application with the simplest of GUIs. Or as he puts it:
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Undefined Behavior != Unsafe Programming
Are you arguing that undefined behaviour should not be a thing in, e.g., C? It sounds like you’re claiming that the fabled sufficiently smart compiler could take code in a C-like language with no UB, and emit something equivalent to what a C compiler would produce given equivalent input in C that correctly avoids UB…
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Learning Elixir: My side-project
I believe that to really learn a programming language, I have to get involved in a project. Getting an overview of the Elixir language was…
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Counting Clojure Code
For better or worse, we count lines of code. We (hopefully) feel a little dirty when we do it, because it's a flawed metric. But we do it . We do it on large codebases and small code snippets . Even badass hacker David Nolen does it .
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Singular Value Decomposition for Programmers
Today's article is a short one. Not because Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is not important, but because it is so ubiquitous that we'll touch it in other...
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Comparing C and C++ usage and performance with a real world project
The relative performance of C and C++ is the stuff of folk legends and Very Strong Opinions. There are microbenchmarks that can prove differ...
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Teaching an AI to play a simple game using Q-learning
In this post I will walk you through how to teach a computer to master a simple video game using the q-learning reinforcement learning algorithm. We will implement the algorithm from scratch in Ruby without the use of external gems. To enable us to illustrate the inner workings of the algorithm we will be teaching […]
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Select(2) is fundamentally broken
In a previous blog post we discussed a brief history of the select(2) syscall . The article concludes that some I/O multiplexing was necessary to do console emulation, games and non-trivial TCP/IP applications.
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Self-Replicating Functions
These are notes I’m creating for myself as I explore functions \(f\) that can be written as a sum \(f = g_1 + g_2\) where \(g_1\) and \(g_2\) are shifted and possibly reflected versions of each other, both strongly resembling the original function \(f\) . When a function \(f\) has these properties, I informally call…
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Smalltalk Envy
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
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Language Models, Word2Vec, and Efficient Softmax Approximations
The Word2Vec model has become a standard method for representing words as dense vectors. This is typically done as a preprocessing step, after which the learned vectors are fed into a discriminative model (typically an RNN) to generate predictions such as movie review sentiment, do machine translation, or even…
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Kernel debugging for newbies
This week, I’ve been working on an application that sets up IPsec connections. PF_KEYv2 is the standard interface for configuring IPsec. PF_KEYv2 is widely-available; even systems with more advanced IPsec stacks (like XFRM on Linux) provide a PF_KEYv2-compatible wrapper. I want my application to work on OS X and…
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Little Lisp interpreter
Little Lisp is an interpreter that supports function invocation, lambdas, lets, ifs, numbers, strings, a few library functions, and lists. I wrote it for a l...
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A different view on Functional Programming
If you have never heard about functional programming before, I’ll have the honor to instill in you my view on it. If you have, you might know that it’s usually defined by some of …
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VHDL or Verilog?
Blog about VHDL projects for FPGA. FPGA tutorials. FPGA free books.
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High quality graphics for Latex documents: The Matlab route
You use L a T e X instead of a WYSIWYG word processing program because they can’t cope with the high quality required for publication. But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures. Bitmap figures are easily pixelated because the actual size is not always known…
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URG
If you asked software engineers some of their “least hated” things, you’ll likely hear both UTF-8 and TCP. TCP, despite being 35 years old, is rock-solid, stable infrastructure that we take for granted today; it’s hard to sometimes realize that TCP was man-made, given how well it’s served us. But within every single…
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Go and Simplicity Debt
Fifteen years ago Python’s GIL wasn’t a big issue. Concurrency was something dismissed as probably unnecessary. What people really was needed was a faster interpreter, after all, who had more than one CPU? But, slowly, as the requirement for concurrency increased, the problems with the GIL increased.
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16-bit math look-up tables – the unexpected power of scaled-integer math
Floating-point math puts a big overhead on a computer that doesn't have a floating-point coprocessor; but we really do need floating-point for all but the simplest operations— or do we?? Can we really do things like trig, log, and square-root functions without floating point?