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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
When explaining Go to new programmers, I've found that it often helps to explain what Go values look like in memory, to build the right intuition about which operations are expensive and which are not. This post is about basic types, structs, arrays, and slices.
When you want to get the dimensions of a video file, you probably want the display aspect ratio. Using the dimensions of a stored frame may result in a stretched or squashed video.
How I developed Daino Notes block editor from scratch.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
The new Processor Trace instrument has flown under the radar with this years WWDC announcements but many developers will find it truly indispensable.
After watching this year’s EmacsConf and seeing Guile Emacs being resurrected I thought to myself - why limit ourselves to Guile? Sure, Guile isn’t just a Scheme implementation, thanks to its compiler-tower-based design. Other languages exist for Guile VM, such as Emacs Lisp, and Guile manual lists the following…
When measuring the size of a two-dimensional digital picture, the unit pixel is used in a weird overloaded way. Sometimes, it is used as a unit of linear length. For example, each frame of an animation is 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) web standard has px as a unit of length…
This is going to be a long post, but I hope you get value out of it. This wasn’t an easy topic to tackle but it was definitely worthwhile!
Is SQLite durable by default? What settings guarantee durability? The documentation and even comments from its creator give conflicting answers.
This page is a mini-site for my Snobol excursion with links to separate pages for my:
An informal introduction to formality in Lean 4
A Date in JavaScript always represents a point in time (i.e. milliseconds since epoch). This is more apparent when printing out the full date string:
(Previous post in the series was on Jai and can be found here)
From ChatGPT Plugins to Agent Skills, a look at how we've been trying (and failing) to extend LLMs for the last three years.
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re…
This post talks about the many different aspects under the umbrella term OOP
Wasm GC is a wonderful thing that is now available in all major web browsers since slowpoke Safari/WebKit finally shipped it in December. It provides a hierarchy of heap allocated reference types and a set of instructions to operate on them. Wasm GC enables managed memory languages to take advantage of the advanced…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Bridge the gap between structured logging and errors in Go
(Image of "Four-Armed Chuck" programming a PDP-11 is from my giant write-up of Forth .)
The materials for the course on compilers: built incrementally and fully in tagless-final style
A proof-of-concept using Vamp, Chordino, ImageSharp and ffmpeg to add live guitar chord charts to karaoke videos
We’ve learned how to define and apply Monte Carlo integration—fundamentally, it’s the only tool we need. In the remaining chapters, we’ll explore ways to reduce variance and successfully sample difficult distributions.
Microservices work best as a polytree with clear dependencies and no cycles. Learn how this structure reduces complexity and makes systems easier to scale and maintain.
Personal Musings and Transcripts
The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025, which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishly titled It’s never been easier to write TLA⁺ tooling! which I…
A short post about a neat little Zig idiom. Consider your average {sum type, variant, tagged union, enum, alt}:
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct…
