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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
This was a fun project for a couple of days, but I will probably shelve it for now so I can continue what I was already working on before. Read on to follow along with my journey. Spoilers: I didn’t get very far.
Death (XIII) Symbolizes significant change, transformation, and endings, rather than literal physical death. Have you ever seen a Number grazing in the f
An "impossible" Ruby bug: Hashes becoming Strings at runtime. 2,700 identical crashes. No corruption. Just objects changing what they are. Deep dive.
Understanding query planner quirks yielded a ~35% speedup.
Have you ever asked yourself what if we could replace any message broker with a very simple one using only two UNIX signals? Well, I'm not surprised if you
Be careful what you wish for...
Introducing Source Spotter, a Go Checksum Database auditor and Go toolchain reproducer
Introduction I created a Game Boy emulator in Ruby and released it as a gem called rubyboy! (I’d be happy if you could give it a star!) And now it runs in the browser using WebAssembly! Try the demo in your browser! Screenshots Rubyでゲームボーイのエミュレータを作りました！ カラー対応やWasmでブラウザ対応もやっていきたい💪 GitHub: https://t.co/hFwmZD6FNp…
I've always been told that caching is a tool to make software faster. That, given some careful considerations to consistency, caching makes it so that when...
A discussion of how Sorbet's type syntax came to be, the problems it solves, and how it could improve.
I went on a little low-level Nix adventure yesterday and early this morning because of this excellent blog post. In it, Farid builds up the simplest possible Nix derivation—making a file that has the contents “hello world”. Here’s what I like about it:
See this ugly pixel shift when upsampling a downsampled image? My post describes where it can come from and how to avoid those! It’s been more than two decades of me using bilinear texture filterin…
An article from dylanbeattie.net
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
No-one really likes engineering war stories, but this one's relevant because there's a moral to it. I've talked before about defining technical debt as technical decisions that provide immediate value, but with long-term negative impact if they aren't cleaned up. Sometimes introducing technical debt
A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.
For sure easier than solving it in SAT!
We explore language models that recursively call themselves or other LLMs before providing a final answer. The aim is essentially unbounded context, and a way through context rot.
Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them
Writing a Hypervisor in 1,000 Lines
As we saw in the opening post, SQLite stores metadata about tables in a special "schema table" starting on page 1. We've been reading records from this…
How building edge-case first led to bloated, overly-granular libraries and what we can do about it
A friend called me last week. Someone who’d built web applications back for a long time before moving exclusively to backend and infra work. He’d just opened a modern React codebase for the first time in over a decade.
At one level, this question is not very fair, because an answer to it as stated would be that one simply does not use doubly linked lists. They have been popular in introductory computer science lectures because they are a neat way to explain pointers in a data structure that's easy to draw on a whiteboard, but they…
The gophers nested too greedily and too deep.
Timeline & Responsible Disclosure
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go.
I have a spicy git alias that allows me to "archive" old git branches by converting them to tags, making them less visible across git tooling. # ~/.gitconfig…
To start off, we can leverage the STL for this calculation. std::count_if() more precisely:
