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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
Introduction Large language models are trained on huge datasets of text to learn the relationships and contexts of words within larger documents. These relationships are what allows the model to generate text. Recently I've read concerns about LLMs being trained on copyrighted text and reproducing it. This got me…
“Print the sum of 50 million ASCII-encoded integers uniformly sampled from [0, 2³¹−1], separated by a single new line and sent to standard input.”
Overview of Python's Package management ecosystem in 2024
Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to teach the author a useful trick…
In January 2008 David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker published an article criticising MapReduce. As far as I can find, the article is no lon...
History of Perl releases since version 5.6, each with a summary of added or changed features.
Rust is my favorite programming language. I've been writing Rust for about 6 years, from college to professionally, and I'm vocal about how helpful the compi...
While I was looking the other way, Python got advanced static types! Here’s matrix multiplication, describing the input shapes and its output shape:
Make parallel tasks print nicely with zero dependencies.
This question is always asked. My thoughts are a little bit different than what I've read online.
As someone building a browser I need to parse a lot of URLs. Partially to validate them, but also to normalize them or get specific parts out of the URL. The URL API in browsers lets you do that, but it’s ergonomics aren’t ideal. The problem with new URL() The “new” in front of new […]
Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line…
my deployment platform is a shell script 2024-04-09 like many people, i fell in love with free software because i could install it. i'd come home from work and install a bunch of software. what fun! tee hee! a playground and i'm the prince! but eventually, relentlessly, it all starts to feel more like a horror show…
Bill Caputo , through repeated conversations we've had, has convinced me of something very surprising. It was something that changed the way I think about the world, and how I do my job.
One product of mine takes reports that come in as a table that’s been exported to PDF, which means text extraction. For dollar figures I find a prefixed dollar symbol and convert the number following it into a float . If there’s a hyphen in addition to the dollar symbol, it’s negative.
I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.
One of the things I like to do is compare how different languages solve the same problem — especially when they end up having very different approaches. It’s always educational. In this case, a bunch of us have been working hard on trying to get reflection — a really transformative language feature — into C++26…
A long time ago, I wrote a memoization library for Ruby. It was not easy, but I learned a great deal in the process. In this article, I am share these learnings and showing you how deep the memoization rabbit hole goes.
Not sure if your compilers have matching ABIs? Then put them through the ultimate compatibility crucible and pair them up on a shift at The ABI Café! Find out if your one true pairing fastcalls for each other or are just another slowburn disaster. (Maid outfits optional but recommended.)
Acknowledgements First, I would like to acknowledge my friends and kind internet strangers who helped me with this post. This post heavily adapts from ...
I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes something is ju...
Learning about the subtle gotcha with ARG and FROM instruction ordering in Dockerfile definitions.
I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme:
I often need to launch a program in the terminal in a retry loop. Maybe because it's flaky, or because it tries to contact a remote service that is not available. A few scenarios:
We build complex mathematical formulas bottom-up using pure lambda calculus. Includes instructions of how to translate Taylor series and other approximations to lambda terms.
