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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
A few days ago I published a short post about two bugs I wrote while developing the C++ external scanner for my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. Reactions were mixed! Many people were supportive, but there were of course the usual drive-by claims by developers that the bugs were trivial, they would’ve found & fixed them…
People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.
Someone is wrong on the Internet; he said that all code is technical debt, and I refute that.
This post explores one of my favorite hacks in SerenityOS. I don’t recommend doing this in your codebase, but it has worked for us so far. :^)
fzf is a popular tool among command line hackers. But if you're an Emacs user, it's hard to use as it requires an interactive terminal. What if you could use Emacs to do the fuzzy finding instead of fzf?
A very good friend of mine has been experimenting with trying to coax Chat-GPT4 to successfully do basic coding tasks. So have a lot of people these days, of course. In an idle moment, though, my friend submitted the following query:
When learning a new programming language, there is usually a table in the documentation that shows the various operators that can be used with numbers.
For a while now I've been trying to find a good way to explain what structured concurrency is, and how it applies to Rust. I've come up with zingers such as: "Structured concurrency is structured programming as applied to concurrent control-flow primitives" . But that requires me to start explaining what structured…
The TodoMVC implemented in Kobold weighs about 30kb when gzipped over the wire, out of which the gzipped Wasm blob is under 20kb. There are no tricks there . I haven't replaced the default allocator, nor have I minified the JavaScript (although I probably should).
Between the Material You design and move to break apart the Chrome browser from ChromeOS, now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment.
For some inane reason, Github classifies me as a "major open source maintainer", which means I get a free copilot subscription.1 I've been using it for a...
I built a device that allows a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet. The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game.
Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal. That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the journey. I had a sea of broken images. Even though the…
2025 edition. this is very different from most "best books for programmers" lists you'll see, with Code Complete and Clean Code and Wistful Wanking for Practical Wankers and Design Slatterns and titles like that. you'll figure all that out as you go along. these are books to read so that you can cut motherfuckers with…
Tutorial on how to make a stack trace or backtrace manually unwinding the stack using ELF’s .eh_frame and call frame information (CFI)
As regular readers of this blog will now, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of my favorite tools of the Java platform. This low-overhead event recording engine built into the JVM is invaluable for …
Explore how the Deno runtime can enable JavaScript code execution in a Rust application via a proof-of-concept project called "js-in-rs". Discover the flexibility and versatility of using JavaScript expressions as filters in a CLI, written in Rust, as a powerful alternative to regular expressions. Watch out grep!
I’ve been programming in Clojure for a long time, but I haven’t been using transducers much. I learned to mechanically transform (into [] (map f coll)) to (into [] (map f) coll) for a slight performance gain, but not much beyond that. Recently, however, I’ve found myself refactoring transducers-based code at work…
I’m not sure of the exact date, but 20 years ago, around now, I started my first professional programming job. It’s weird to think about having done anything for 20 years. That’s as long as all my schooling put together.
Fiber, a less known concept compared with coroutine, is a pretty powerful addition to cooperative multitasking. As a graphics programmer in game industry, I totally appreciate the great flexibility that fiber brings on the table. As a matter of fact, I feel the tech is a little bit underappreciated due to the lack of…
Emulating win32 on Mac using Apple's x64 emulator.
Series Introduction In this series of articles I would like to share with you a set of ideas that are meant to help non-technical people build a better intuition as to what the current software and…
( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)
There is a strange thing that I noticed as I progressed from a junior engineer to mid-career to senior. When you’re a new engineer, still learning the basics, you are given a task or you have an idea, and you proceed to implement exactly that idea. Very simple, point A to point B, whatever gets the job done. You hate…
It is the result of mistakes made and lessons learned in a range of Django and Python projects over 15+ years.
Improving API function calls using inline assembly
Executive Summary of Bi-temporality
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:
The eigenvectors of a circulant matrix do not depend on the matrix itself, only on the size, and the eigenvectors are columns of the FFT matrix.
