Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
It's well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I've discovered that on Catalina, pasting a…
In which I lament the fact that many frontend Web engineers don't understand the end product of their work, HTML.
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.
I had the opportunity to work on scaling a React rendering service, adapting a fixed hardware provision to deal with increasing load. Over the course of many months, incremental improvements were made to the system to enable it to cope with demand. I thought it might be useful to share the more interesting insights…
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
This blog post is an illustrated guide to regex and aims to provide a gentle introduction for people who never have fiddled with regex, want to, but are kind of intimidated by the whole thing.
Given the expansive growth in the field, it's become challenging to discern what belongs in a modern computer science degree.
End-to-end Encryption Support, Smart Scroll Sync for Side-by-side View, New Logo, and More.
This year, I’ve become increasingly acquainted with the DEV platform. It’s a refreshingly positive oasis in the large sea of angry Reddit commenters and “well actually” connoisseurs that is the broader software world. One interesting facet of this community is that it seems pretty beginner-heavy. I regularly see posts…
A quick walk through demoing how to use Gooey as the frontend for any language or application!
ds160 has 2 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
I’m a software engineer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. My interests include getting computers to behave, helping other people get computers to behave, open source, maths, and music.
I started to compile a list of public failure/horror stories related to Kubernetes. It should make it easier for people tasked with operations to find outage reports to learn from. Since we started w
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostl…
I have been part of the Firefox Test Pilot team for several years. I had a long list of things I wanted to build. Some I didn’t personally want to build, but I thought they were interesting ideas. I didn’t get very far through this list at all, and now that Test Pilot is being retired I am unlikely to get to them in…
Despite it being sold as the one true path, event sourcing comes with some pain points when you try to put its ideas into production.
This article shows how to construct a non-recursive zip bomb that achieves a high compression ratio by overlapping files inside the zip container. "Non-recursive" means that it does not rely on a decompressor's recursively unpacking zip files nested within zip files: it expands fully after a single round of…
I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how …
Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…
Pancakes and computers
Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an…
Autocompleting text with known values seems like an easy problem to solve, but so so so many UIs get it wrong. I see this frequently enough that, rather than complain about them individually, I though I’d just write down the set of rules they often break.
