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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
I was reading yet another blog post titled "Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y> (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
My current "investment thesis" is that what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers. When it comes to eking performance out of hand-authored JavaScript and accompanying runtime libraries, we've reached the point of diminishing returns.
If you have a software background and you want to pick up digital design,then one of the first things you need to learn about early on is the conceptof the c...
As software developers, I think we can agree that open-source 1 code has transformed the world . Its public nature tears down the walls that prevent some pieces of software from becoming the best they can be. The problem is that too many valuable projects stagnate, with burned-out leaders:
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Overall, Rust is pretty good for performance. Write the most simple, naive stuff, and it will usually run within a factor of two from optimized C/C++ code, without any further performance work on the code. With some investment into optimizations, matching or exceeding C’s speed should be possible in most cases…
Last week, I released A Snake’s Tale on iOS , Android , Windows, Mac, and Linux .
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that …
In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling…
In this essay, we are going to look at recursive algorithms, and how sometimes, we can organize an algorithm so that it resembles the data structure it manipulates, and organize a data structure so that it resembles the algorithms that manipulate it.
-- "Have you ever detected anyone trying to add a backdoor to curl?" -- "Have you ever been pressured by an organization or a person to add suspicious code to curl that you wouldn't otherwise accept?" -- "If a crime syndicate would kidnap your family to force you to comply, what backdoor would you be … Continue…
tldr; you can do jobs, queues, real time change feeds, time series, object store, document store, full text search with PostgreSQL. How to,...
On Friday I accepted a challenge to clone Reddit's /r/place in a weekend. And I did it, and its live, and its amazing: Being able to build this in a weekend isn't genius. Its possible because programming is made up of 2 activities: Making decisions (95%) Typing (5%) Reddit
Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…
An extensive tutorial on how to implement a neural network in JavaScript with deeplearn.js to perform machine learning in JavaScript. You can bring neural networks to your browser by using the performance benefits of WebGL. Deeplearn.js makes it possible to implement a WebGL powered neural network ...
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
This post is the first of many to come on Apache Arrow, pandas, pandas2, and the general trajectory of my work in recent times and into the foreseeable future. This is a bit of a read and overall fairly technical, but if interested I encourage you to take the time to work through it.
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...
Today I landed yet another small change to libcurl internals that further reduces the number of small mallocs we do. This time the generic linked list functions got converted to become malloc-less (the way linked list functions should behave, really). Instrument mallocs I started out my quest a few weeks ago by…
When Git first came onto the scene in the mid 2000's, I was initially skeptical because of its horrible user interface. But once I learned it, I appreciated its speed and features - especially the ease at which you could create feature branches, merge, and even create commits offline (which was a big deal in the era…
This post describes how to write a simple Hello world bootloader
