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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 968 posts.
In Python, the dict data structure is the conventional key-value structure. E.g., you might store a list of names as keys and have their phone numbers as values. Valentin Ignatev wrote this amusing post on X: It is indeed widely believed that, in the strict sense, the dict data structure and its companion, the set ……
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eve...
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else…
TL;DR: Gas Town and Beads have both released version 1.0.0 today. Enjoy!
Chrome introduced a new API, window.showDirectoryPicker() that allows the user to grant access to a directory on their computer and allow a website to read/write everything inside.
AI coding is blurring the lines between engineers, PMs, and designers. In the short-term, it's going to cause havoc. What happens long-term?
Hello everyone, It has been quite a long time since my last blog, the last couple of months had been very busy and packed with a lot of work so I barely had much time to write blogs. Time runs so fast that the last time when I wrote a blog I was still a DevOps Engineer and now I am a Product Developer lol.
confusable-vision renders every TR39 confusable pair across 230 macOS system fonts and measures visual similarity with SSIM. 96.5% of confusables.txt is not high-risk, but 82 pairs are pixel-identical in at least one font.
Build the smallest Rust async runner and see how futures, polling, waking, and runtimes work together.
An new old approach to emulation.
Java classes become CLOS classes, seven JVM languages share one Lisp expression, and a saved Spring Boot application launches in 84 milliseconds.
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
Read this Tcl/Tk hands-up/primer to find out how the open-source Command Tool Language toolkit can help you develop cross-plaform tools for Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android.
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
Join me as I update a project through 10 years of Unity editors. Along the way I will talk about my process, Unity tips and tricks, and the tech changes of Unity Engine - several of which I observed firsthand while working at Unity.
A deep dive into Emacs's widget library: what it does well, where it falls apart, and a step-by-step case study of building a table widget with editable cells. Includes working code and hard-won lessons about state management, layout hacks, and cursor position preservation.
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
As my cat woke me up way too early for a Saturday morning, I decided to put all this extra time (and my ChatGPT Pro subscription) into good use and generated a QR-code generator for PostgreSQL, written as a single pure SQL statement. No external libraries or Postgres extension installation needed! The pqr.sql example…
I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go.
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built in all the wrong ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software…
My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores.To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there…
On why bitmap fonts still carry more life than most default tech type.
Last year I've fixed a bug in Linux kernel OHCI (USB 1.1) stack , which rendered my old printer unreliable: OHCI adds artificial delay of 1ms for each USB transfer of send-read pattern, while my very old, host-based printer expects very tight timings and constant latency, like some kind of CnC machine.
In 2019 I bet on the no-code revolution. That bet aged so-so. Here is the new one.
A write-up of a full shader debugging session to find out why my Voronoi Diagram shader was stuttering in one specific machine.
I'll give a brief outline of how to enable HTTP/2 cleartext (h2c) in a Go API server when you are using Go 1.24 or newer. This is useful in Cloud Run environments, which handles TLS termination but can take advantage of HTTP/2 features.
Packing ternary numbers with efficient SIMD-friendly unpacking on binary computers
