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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.
With my iPad having replaced my MacBook, the last thing I was missing was Emacs , which I not only enjoy hacking on, but is also how update my blog and resume! Let’s just say that it’s an integral tool in my life which I wanted access to, and I managed to make it happen.
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of…
I recently stumbled upon a blog post by Alejandra González (a.k.a @blyxyas) that seeks to compress a tic-tac-toe game state into as few bits as possible. She arrived at a solution in 18 bits. This got me thinking, can we do better?
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Personal Notes
There are many alternatives to C strings. Here we explore the design space.
There has been a lot of noise recently on how GitHub is bad, and how developers should stop using it.
In The Two Things about the Two Things, it's noted that people are unlikely to agree what the two things are, especially when it comes to computing. So I'm going to cheat.
This post explores one of my favorite hacks in SerenityOS. I don’t recommend doing this in your codebase, but it has worked for us so far. :^)
Just hearing the word CMake is typically enough to make a shiver run down my spine. I’ve been deep in the muck of its behavior and tooling the last few weeks as I finish up a CMake library titled IXM. While the various minutiae of how IXM works, why I wrote it, and all the nice little usage details are definitely for…
Last week I had the pleasure of attending RustForge in Wellington, New Zealand. I gave a talk titled “Wild performance tricks”. You can watch a recording of my talk . If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, the rest of this post will cover more or less the same material. The talk shows some linker benchmarks, which…
Before I go into the specifics of my record attempt, it is important for you to have some background information. Over the past few years I have been steadily acquiring server hardware to increase my knowledge of system administration and cyber security. This is not only for personal growth: it has also helped me…
Update: This has been frontpaged on Hacker News and I’ve posted Instapaper’s browser usage stats .
Sometimes a programming design pattern becomes common enough to warrant its own special syntax. Python’s list comprehensions are a prime example...
The basics condensed into one very large document
GC within a function doesn't work how I expected
Projects to pay down tech debt tend to start by making more tech debt. The level of tech debt gets worse before it gets better. The new, cleaner code is just adding to the mess until it allows you to finally delete the old code.
fzf is a popular tool among command line hackers. But if you're an Emacs user, it's hard to use as it requires an interactive terminal. What if you could use Emacs to do the fuzzy finding instead of fzf?
I needed to log when a light switched on and off during the night as part of debugging an oddly behaving movement sensor. To do that I built...
A tip on how to add a target on your Makefile to list all available targets
Troy Hunt recently published a blog post titled “Authentication guidance for the modern era”. It has a big pile of solid advice on what…
A very good friend of mine has been experimenting with trying to coax Chat-GPT4 to successfully do basic coding tasks. So have a lot of people these days, of course. In an idle moment, though, my friend submitted the following query:
tiling window managers are wonderful. ultra-flexible text editors are also wonderful. for a spell, i thought i'd found the ideal solution in exwm … and i think it would have been, save for the fact that i use ordinary, graphical windows as much, if not more than, text buffers, and sometimes those windows are from…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
The FILTER clause extends aggregate functions (SUM, AVG, COUNT, etc.) with an additional WHERE clause. Databases not supporting FILTER can use CASE within the aggregate function instead.
