8671
Vector Animations with Python (2014)
I am a big fan of Dave Whyte’s vector animations, like this one: It was generated using a special animation language called Processing (here is Dave …
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
8672
Shell Completions in Rust
If you've ever hit the tab key while typing commands in the shell, you are familiar with the value of shell completions. Bash has some default completion behavior, which is why you can type hel<TAB> and end up with help . It is also possible to add additional completion scripts which define the completion behavior for…
8673
Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game
The story of changing a single byte
8674
Understanding the C/C++ memory model
I know that a lot of people struggle with understanding the memory model introduced in C11/C++11. In a recent conversation I was alerted to the existence of this blog post, which while correct (by …
8675
PostgreSQL 11 Reestablishes Window Functions Leadership
PostgreSQL 11 offers the best OVER clause support among its competitors, true procedures, and improvements in FETCH FIRST and XML.
8676
A Tour of Go - Real examples of interfaces and concurrency
Last week, I gave a talk about Go at the Boston Google Developers Group meeting. There were some problems with the recording, so I have rerecorded the talk as a screencast and posted it on YouTube.
8677
Street Fighter II, Sound System Internals
This article is part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
8678
8679
Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
8680
Stack traces in GHCi, coming in GHC 8.0.1
Bluesky: @simonmar.bsky.social Github: simonmar Email: marlowsd@gmail.com LinkedIn: Simon Marlow
8681
Go’ing Insane: Endless Error Handling
I’ve been using Go for a few years now, mostly in my open source project Lazygit. In my day job I use Ruby and Typescript, and I’ve also spent some time with Rust. Each of those languages have design quirks that can grind a developer’s gears, and although my own precious gears have been ground by every language I’ve…
8682
Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica
Substantial set of new and updated functions in Version 13.1 covers generalized listability, language conveniences, emoji computations, default toolbar, large-scale code editing, drawing in notebooks, Tree expansion, video capture, mathematics, customizable documentation, chemical quantities, machine learning…
8683
Vim is touch-typing on steroids
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
8684
Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014)
Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…
8685
Optimizers need a rethink
Thoughts on how compiler and database optimizers should evolve in the future, focusing on predictability and guarantees instead of smarts and heroics
8686
8687
Tests Are Overhyped
Let me lead off by saying that I don’t think tests are bad. I really don’t. But here’s the thing: I don’t care what your test-code ratios are. You know what the best test-code ratio is? Whatever you need to make sure your crap works while still getting product out the door.
8688
The lat/lon floating point delusion
This morning I had a shower for 6.11686718 minutes. For breakfast I had 189.41576911 ml of fruit juice, followed by 75.24902503 g of muesli topped with 36.55668786 ml of milk and 15.44171338 g of yogurt.
8689
8690
Game Development Post-Unity
What are the options for game developers looking to migrate away from Unity?
8691
Evaluating new software forges
What options are there other than GitHub?
8692
Programming isn’t coding (2020)
When teaching “programming”, a surprisingly small amount of time is spent actually helping students with logic – and a lot helping them learning & managing programming tools.
8693
UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8
On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.
8694
A response about dep and vgo
Peter Bourgon has a web site, and this is that web site.
8695
Making Code Faster
I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster.
8696
Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
ASDF , the de facto standard build system for Common Lisp, has been vastly improved between 2009 and 2014. These and other improvements finally bring Common Lisp up to par with "scripting languages" in terms of ease of writing and deploying portable code that can access and "glue" together functionality from the…
8697
Long Names are Long
One smart thing Google does is rigorous code reviews. Every change, before you can land it, gets reviewed in at least two ways. First, someone on the team does a normal review to make sure the code does what it’s supposed to.
8698
8699
Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects
In P of EAA I said "don't distribute your objects". Does this advice contradict my interest in Microservices?
8700
Compile time evaluation in Nim, Zig, Rust and C++
Evaluating code at compile time is a capability that most, if not all, compiled programming languages possess, even if it can't be directly used by the programmer, but rather applied as an optimization. In this post, we'll explore a bit how to execute code at compile time in Nim, Zig, Rust and C++.