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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.

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9123

Bye Bye JavaScript Promises

In my previous post , I explored how programming with promises can be made close to programming with values. After some more work on it, and some learning from bluebird , I came to conclude that my brain doesn’t think well with promises. So I wrote a macro for Javascript that expands “tasks” into async state machines…

9124

How I develop with Nix

Recently NixOS was posted to the Haskell reddit, and seems to have been received well. In the comments I mentioned that NixOS allows me to be a more productive Haskell developer, and I would like to discuss how I am using the features offered by NixOS. Before we get into those details, allow me to briefly summarise…

9126

You could have invented futexes

The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…

9132

A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View

Say you run an online book store and want to build a data pipeline that figures out who the top-selling authors are. Logically, the input to the pipeline is a log of every individual book purchase on the store for all time, along with details about each book like who authored it. And the output is a list of the…

9134

Learning Zig

Welcome to Learning Zig, an introduction to the Zig programming language. This guide aims to make you comfortable with Zig. It assumes prior programming experience, though not in any particular language.

9137

Spelunking Apple’s Open Source

Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.This resource is useful primarily to developer

9150

Controlling My A/C with a Gameboy

Last year, I was lucky enough to be gifted a Gameboy Color in great shape. Apart from its intended gameplay features, I also wanted to try and build something meaningful with it, so I made this application to control my air-conditioner over its existing, reverse-engineered infrared protocol.