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My Road to Erlang (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
8522
LLMs are not superhuman at reading and writing neural network weights
A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra…
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Building a Personal Archive with Hoarder
How to self-host a personal archive of web content even if stuff get's taken down
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Python and the Real-time Web
I had interview for the Flask book recently and some questions were related to realtime functionality - how it works, how to integrate realtime portion with conventional WSGI applications, how to structure application code and so on.
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Elixir Streams
I previously wrote about explicitness in Elixir. One of my favorite ways the language embraces explicitness is in its distinction between eager and lazy operations on collections. Any time you use the Enum module, you’re performing an eager operation. Your collection will be transformed/mapped/enumerated immediately…
8527
Careful with that Buffer
Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988 (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part numbers, I did a double take when I realized that a file with random e-mail fragments was, in…
8528
The Log: An Epic Software Engineering Article
There's some sort of inflection point where a "long read" becomes an "epic article." I'm not quite sure where that inflection point is, bu...
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Generalized data structure synthesis
Generalized data structure synthesis Loncaric et al., ICSE’18 Many systems have a few key data structures at their heart. Finding correct and efficient implementations for these data structur…
8532
8086 Microcode Browser
Since releasing 486Tang , I’ve been working on recreating the 8086 with a design that stays as faithful as possible to the original chip. That exploration naturally led me deep into the original 8086 microcode — extracted and disassembled by Andrew Jenner in 2020.
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We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
Lockfiles are an absolutely unnecessary concept that complicates things without a good reason. Dependency managers can and are working without it just the same.
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Falsehoods programmers believe about undefined behavior
All kinds of reasonable-sounding beliefs about undefined behavior are wrong. Let's go through them.
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A bug story: data alignment on x86
This sounds unusual. Who ever wants to do this in real life? Normally, we only see code like this as primary school assignments or compiler benchmarks. However, this time it happened in real life.
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Justice Clarence Thomas uncovered a seven-year-old bug in my program (2013)
Franklin Chen's personal website and blog
8537
Why I Use Elm in 2023
Building UIs in HTML+CSS can be untenable. When making complex frontend experiences, I reach for Elm.
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You probably don't need query builders
In a previous [0] post I’ve discussed why I ditched sea-query and why sql is almostalways the best way to not re-learn something new from the beginning...
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Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors
Within the constraints of the Emacs environment, there are no limits. Emacs is built upon this principle; the Lisp principle. Make some small kernel of features. A substrate. Take care to make this substrate programmable (in any language, Emacs chooses Lisp), and then build the system upon it. Let users worry about…
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A million ways to die from a data race in Go
I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
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Just because you can doesn't mean you should: the <meter> element
A very frustrating brownie recipe illustrates why a semantic element may actally NOT be the right tool for the job.
8543
Bug in Notepad Involving Asterisk in Title Bar
Back in May 27, 2020 Microsoft published a blog post describing a new feature in Notepad:
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Go's Concurrency Examples in Java 19
There is no way for your operating system to know exactly how much stack space a thread will need so it allocates an amount on the order of around a kilobyte initially and then around a megabyte once the thread starts to be used. You only have around a bakers dozen gigabytes of RAM, so you can only have give or take…
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Sync vs. Async Python: What Is the Difference?
Have you heard people say that async Python code is faster than "normal" (or sync) Python code? How can that be? In this article I'm going to try to explain what async is and how it differs from…
8547
How to build an NPM worm
npm is a registry and package manager for JavaScript that ships as part of Node.js . It's used by tens of millions of people to install hundreds of thousands of packages billions of times every week.
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Optimizing compilers reload vector constants needlessly
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions which allow you to load several values at once, and operate (in one instruction) on all these values. Similarly, they allow you to have vector constants. Thus if you wanted to add some integer (say 10001) to all integers in a large array, you might first load a…
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How PHP Opcache Works
The opcache PHP extension implements various functionality to speed up PHP in a transparent manner. As the name indicates, its origin and primary purpose is opcode caching, but nowadays it also contains an optimizer and just-in-time compiler. However, this blog post will focus only on the opcode caching aspect.