Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
Almost a year ago now, Jack Diederich gave a talk entitled “Stop Writing Classes“, in which he implores Python programmers to stop creating classes just for the hell of it, and specifically calls out the common pattern of a class with only a constructor/initializer and a single method—which should, of course, just be…
I wrote a blog post a while ago complaining about Gradle, mostly from a position of ignorance: I had never really taken the time to properly learn the tool and I was frustrated while trying to stumble my way through working with it. But luckily, my company encourages learning and experimentation so I was given an…
You probably know how to use async/await. But have you ever wondered how it works under the hood?
Uli’s blog on programming, game development, pop culture and other boring things.
Wolfram's Version 13.3 includes a subsystem around LLMs plus new functionality in integrals, special functions, finite fields, computational geometry, live highlighting in visualizations, AR & VR deployment. See examples for those and dozens of other enhancements.
Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of an npm package? At its heart, it’s nothing more than a gzipped tarball. Working in software development, source code and binary artifacts are nearly always shipped as .tar.gz or .tgz files. And gzip compression is supported by every HTTP server and web browser…
Systems are constrained to follow the communication patterns of their designers.
I've implemented a first prototype of my personal search engine which I will abbreviate as "pse" from here on out. I implemented it using three Bash scripts relying on sqlite3 , wget and PageFind to do the heavy lifting.
I want the extended-nonce 256-bit reduced-rounds XAES-256-GCM/11 AEAD. It has infinitely randomizable nonces, a comfortable margin of multi-user security, and nearly the same performance as AES-128-GCM. Only issue is that it doesn’t exist.
UPDATE: LiveView has added a built in, more robust way of using this pattern. Check it out here ! I've been using LiveView for about two ye...
I’ve been on a C kick recently as I learn the intricacies involved in low level programming. As a Data Scientist/Python Programmer I work with strings all the time. People say that handling strings in C range anywhere from tricky to downright awful. I was curious so I decided to see how deep the rabbit hole went.
Note: If you disagree with what’s expressed in this post, I encourage you to also take a look at my more nuanced and comprehensive post on the topic of code duplication, which gives a more thorough refutation of some of the popular ideas around duplication. “Duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” is a…
Suppose that the logic of your program depends on time. That is, you need to keep track of when something in the past happened, and what tim...
This blog post presents several techniques to make the binaries resulting from C or C++ compilation smaller with GCC (or Clang). Please note...
F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who's at fault? ...
A modest defense of the rodent So, Emacs and the mouse. This is an unexpectedly contentious topic, with discussions that end, at best, with careless dismissal. More often they turn into arguments with folks talking past one another. The advantages of using the mouse for common actions in Emacs are immediate and…
On the day I chose to start writing this, I went to an afternoon showing of Oldboy at Alamo. There’s a quote that’s repeated at least three times:
How retrowin32 works, at a high level.
Introduction Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a form of programmable hardware that has become inexpensive and accessible recently. I recently purchased a Digilent Basys 3 FPGA development…
In 2005, id Software released the source code for their 1999 game Quake III Arena under the GPL-2 license. In the file code/game/q_math.c , there is a function for calculating the reciprocal square root of a number which at first glance seems to use a very peculiar algorithm:
A self-contained introduction to Gröbner bases and solving polynomial systems
SDL has grown on me over the past year. I didn’t understand its value until viewing it in the right lens: as a complete platform and runtime replacing the host’s runtime, possibly including libc. Ideally an SDL application links exclusively against SDL and otherwise not directly against host libraries, though in…
Listen, I didn’t plan on making a whole ‘writing X like Y’ series. But here we are.
It’s been a while since my last blog post, but I believe it’s better to post late than never, so here I am!
Update (2023-07-21): I was being a bit overly brief with liberal use of ... to mean “unimportant” in the code examples. Ginger Bill (creator of Odin) noted it might be clearer to have more correct/explicit Odin and Zig code for the examples given people would be less familiar. Those has been updated For the past few…
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
Welcome to Learning Zig, an introduction to the Zig programming language. This guide aims to make you comfortable with Zig. It assumes prior programming experience, though not in any particular language.
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.This resource is useful primarily to developer
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
