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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on…
Recently, I’ve been working on a music app that needs to get a musical sequence (like a melody) from the server to the client. To do this, we use a format called ABC. (You can read about how ABC music notation works here .) We chose ABC because it’s more readable than MIDI, it’s pretty concise, and it’s a standard, so…
Over the years, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists have developed various calculi. If you have a background in computer science, you’ve likely heard of the lambda calculus, a m…
Welcome! This is a series of blog posts that shows you how to build a text editor in Rust.
Prolog is a language that excels at defining and exploring relationships. Let’s take advantage of that and use Prolog to explore a few of the myriad of relationships that exist between chords and the guitar’s fretboard.
Earlier this month I wrote about how Windows 10 holds a lock during too much of process destruction, which both serializes this task and causes mouse-cursor hitches and UI hangs (because the same l…
A summary of the work done so far on getting MicroPython to work on the BBC micro:bit device for children.
Zngur (/zængɑr/) is a C++/Rust interop tool. It tries to expose arbitrary Rust types, methods, and functions while preserving their semantics and ergonomics as much as possible. Using Zngur, you can use arbitrary Rust crates in your C++ code as easily as using them in normal Rust code, and you can write idiomatic…
“Summing ASCII Encoded Integers on Haswell at the Speed of memcpy” turned out more popular than I expected, which inspired me to take on another challenge on HighLoad: Counting uint8s . I’m currently only #13 on the leaderboard, ~7% behind #1, but I have already learned some interesting things. In this post I’ll…
Update: All needed files for this tutorial can be found in the GitHub repo linked in the bottom of this page. I noticed that a lot of people are creating graphical programs to the Commodore 64 agai…
This is the introduction to a series on Abstract Algebra. In particular, our focus will be on Galois Fields (also known as Finite Fields) and their applications in Computer Science. This is a project I've been excited about for many years now, but have been too busy to dedicate the adequate effort to meet my…
A wormable vulnerability allowed anyone able to inject text in a build log on builds.sr.ht (or other instances) to take over accounts who viewed them
Mistral Contrastin's thought bubble, blog, and personal revelations.
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
Using events to design applications is a practice that seems to be around since the late 1980s. We can use events anywhere in the frontend or backend. When a button is pressed, when some data chang…
Many years ago, sometime in the nineties, my family was having dinner at the neighbours', and their son showed me some cool DOS programs on the computer. One of the programs was a demo that drew animated flames on the screen. I was amazed! Asking what language it was written in, I was told it was Pascal.
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Nobody wants to deliver late, over-budget software. I don’t know a single software developer who wakes up in the morning and thinks “I’d like to do a rubbish job today. How can I cost my employer more money?” And yet, so many software projects don’t go well. And with every new project, there seems to be more and more…
These are my notes after learning the Paxos algorithm. The primary goal here is to sharpen my own understanding of the algorithm, but maybe someone will find this explanation of Paxos useful! This post assumes fluency with mathematical notation.
A blog about computer science, systems, technology, and sometimes vegan cooking.
Font rasterisation is, in the author’s opinion, one of the most interesting fields of computer science. If music is the subjective application of physics, then font rasterisation is almost certainly the subjective application of computer science. The purpose of this article is threefold: firstly, to provide an…
The previous post in this series was a quick introduction to the world of SAT and SAT solvers. In this post, we will convert a harder real-world problem, namely _master-key system_, into SAT and explore some of the more advanced techniques used to efficiently convert problems to SAT.
Rust Qt Binding Generator lets you combine Rust code with a Qt 1 graphical application. A previous blog shows how to make a simple clock. It’s a good idea to read that post before reading this more advanced post, because in this post we are getting serious.
You often see the question “What stack should I use to develop my application on?” posed but rarely do you get any insight in the actual process once someone decides to answer it specifically, so both as an analogy to rubber-ducking this and showing you what went on while I made my choice I’ve decided to document the…
