811
FTX – The fraud was in the code
The jury got a taste of code review as they examined a falsified "insurance fund" and the infamous FTX → Alameda Research "backdoor".
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
812
Plain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test
Designing APIs is hard. Designing good APIs that future people will not instantly classify as "total crap" is even harder. There are typical...
813
Parsing an Undocumented File Format
A year or two ago, I wrote a parser for an undocumented file format as part of a larger project. This was somewhat challenging and I wanted to share my approach because I thought it was a neat idea that worked well.
814
Make your programs run faster by better using the data cache (2020)
We investigate how the data cache influences the performance of your program, talk about ways for you to write faster programs by better leveraging the data cache.
815
A Cryptographic Near Miss
A recent issue in scalar multiplication makes for a good case study of how unsafe interfaces, undocumented assumptions, and time lead to vulnerabilities.
816
Browsers barely care what HTTP status code your web pages are served with
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…
817
Rust Is a Scalable Language
In my last post about Zig and Rust, I mentioned that Rust is a scalable language. Let me expand on this a bit.
818
Short, friendly base32 slugs from timestamps
~4 lines of Go to produce succinct, stable, URL-friendly slugs from timestamps.
819
Hypervisor from Scratch (2022)
We write about Windows Internals, Hypervisors, Linux, and Networks.
820
Why do we create modern desktop GUI apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript? (2022)
This was a post on [Quora](https://qr.ae/pG0hvt) and I thought I have more to say than I can write in a reply, so here goes, a blog article inst...
821
How Memory safety approaches speed up and slow down development velocity
Every March, developers worldwide each try to make a roguelike game in less than 168 hours as part of the 7DRL Challenge . Roguelike games are hard , involving procedural level generation, pathfinding, line-of-sight algorithms, and more dijkstra maps than you can imagine.
822
Performance excuses debunked
There are many legitimate arguments to be had about performance, but there are also plain old excuses. It's time to end the excuses.
823
824
Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality
A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice
825
i386 Assembly Language trick for storing data in .text
Don’t want a big old bloated multi-kilobyte executable with a data segment, but you do need to store some data?
826
Towards a new SymPy
This is the first part of a series of posts on big changes for SymPy with particular focus on speed. What I am going to describe in these posts are:
827
Hands-Free Coding (2020)
Earlier this year, I lost the ability to use a keyboard and mouse for extended periods. Fortunately, this wasn't as catastrophic as it sounds! This article chronicles my experience using adaptive tools like dictation and eye-tracking as my primary mechanisms for writing code.
828
Interesting things about the Lua interpreter (2020)
The Lua programming language is unusual among its peers. It’s a dynamically typed, scripting language with a really small core (100-200kB), but runs efficiently, has far simpler semantics than other similar languages, and is just as old as the giants like JavaScript, Python, and Ruby – first made in a research lab…
829
Collecting and curating material is good and we should do it more
Chronicling, plugin systems, and six other disjointed ideas combine in an argument of how to "engineerize" software more
830
A not-so-quick introduction to the C++ allocator model
My paper P1144R8 “std::is_trivially_relocatable” has, in the past few months, been joined by three(!) papers out of Bloomberg:
831
Why Kakoune
Recently I’ve stumbled upon a video about Kakoune, a code editor: Idiot user tries to use Kakoune (for notes? Also Helix?). Funnily enough, I was mentioned in this video, which was a surprise, and made me laugh for quite a while: Let’s go back to the official plugins page.
832
833
Nix journey part 0: Learning and reference materials
In this series I'll be documenting my journey learning Nix and this first installment is more of a prequel. A common complaint when learning Nix is that the documentation "is not good", and I think what people mean by that is that the documentation is spread across several sources which may or may not be easy to find…
834
Upsert in SQL
Inserting and updating data with a single query.
835
New tool from curl creator – trurl – for URL parsing and manipulation
trurl is a tool in a similar spirit of tr but for URLs. Here, tr stands for translate or transpose. trurl is a small command line tool that parses and manipulates URLs, designed to help shell script authors everywhere. URLs are tricky to parse and there are numerous security problems in software because of this. ……
836
C++ Neural Network in a Weekend (2020)
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
837
An easy-to-implement, arena-friendly hash map
My last article had tips for for arena allocation . This next article demonstrates a technique for building bespoke hash maps that compose nicely with arena allocation. In addition, they’re fast, simple, and automatically scale to any problem that could reasonably be solved with an in-memory hash map. To avoid…
838
BASIC was not just a programming language
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
839
Emotions: A Code Book
What I write about my own personal journey is intended as just that—my personal journey.
840
My favorite coding question to give candidates
A coding question, from the viewpoint of an Google/Amazon/Microsoft interviewer