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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. What the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, and my guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
I've seen a couple of recent posts where the writer mentioned asking LLMs to do something with a certain probability or a certain percentage of the time. There is a particular example that stuck in my mind which I've since lost the link to (If you're the author, please get in touch so I can link through to you): The…
…same goes for option objects.
Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
Go 1.23 added Iterators, so lets build a js like streaming api
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
TLDR: I wanted to generate an up-to-date disk image for a Rock Pi 4 using Yocto that included CUPS and Docker to both get a better understanding of Yocto …
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…
The more I use CSS, the more I think it’s an absolute wild wild west. It’s mature, ubiquitous, yet lacks basic, common-sense features that come as a given in other similar tools
Lately, my Magit buffer broke once again because of something weird going on with major mode, and I couldn’t stash or commit hunks unless the point was at the beginning of the line. That once again reminded me that Emacs UI is not really a UI, all of it is mere text with a bunch of properties slapped on top.
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
I had a crazy thought. Don't all good ideas start with that phrase? Well, this one was suitably crazy: why not build my own version of MongoDB right on top of Postgres? It sounds a little far-fetched, but in all honesty it's pretty simple.
Really, POSIX? Really? memset() isn't async-signal-safe? How is it not safe? … oh … that's why
There's no official support for system-versioned tables in Postgres yet, and the temporal extensions aren't supported on Azure/AWS/GCP. Let's implement it ourselves with 3 triggers and an index.
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
-> is right associative, The function definitions from the previous slide will be parsed like this:
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
A simple, whitespace theme for academics. Based on [*folio](https://github.com/bogoli/-folio) design.
One of the long-standing issues that we’ve been wrestling with in Rust is how to integrate the concept of an “uninhabited type” – that is, a type which has no values at all. Uninhabited types are useful to represent the “result” of some computation you know will never execute – for example, if you have to define an…
