961
Giving GPT “Infinite” Knowledge
How to give GPT access to large amounts of data
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
962
Internals of async / await in JavaScript
If you have ever used JavaScript in the past, there is a high chance you have encountered the async / await syntax. async / a
963
A toy programming language in 137 lines of Python code
I thought it would be fun to go outside of my comfort zone of web development topics and write about something completely different and new, something I have never written about before. So today, I'm…
964
Reverse Engineering the Apple Multipeer Connectivity Framework (2022)
Some time ago I was using Logic Pro to record some of my music and I needed a way to start and stop the recording from an iPhone, so I found about Logic Remote…
965
Curl Command Line Variables
If you are anything like me, you appreciate solving your every day simple tasks directly from the command line. Creating crafty single shot command lines or a small shell script to solve that special task you figured out you needed and makes your day go a little smoother. A fellow command line cowboy. Video…
966
Globally Distributed Elixir over Tailscale
The result of my exploration of Elixir clustering and automating global network discovery and connection over Tailscale.
967
Static Hermes: Compile JavaScript to speed it up 300x (in microbenchmarks)
How to speed up a ubenchmark 300x Static Hermes: How to Speed Up a Micro-benchmark by 300x Without Cheating This is th...
968
Effortless Performance Improvements in C++: std:unordered_map
This is the second post in the series about effortless performance improvements in C++. Check the first post to get the full story!
969
Write Posix Shell
write posix shell 2023-03-10 /\ {.-} ;_.-'\ { _.}_ \.-' / `, \ | / \ | ,/ [0] \|_/ what is shell? most people in tech are familiar with shell scripts. but shell is a language! ... shit. actually. wait, let me rephrase- most people _use_ shell. most people _avoid_ shell. but mostly most people _hate_ shell. but should…
970
Just how constexpr is C++20’s std:string?
In C++20, string and vector are marked constexpr, which means they’re somewhat usable in compile-time programming. For example, we can write:
971
Using uninitialized memory for fun and profit (2008)
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
972
Four Kinds of Optimisation
Premature optimisation might be the root of all evil, but overdue optimisation is the root of all frustration. No matter how fast hardware becomes, we find it easy to write programs which run too slow. Often this is not immediately apparent. Users can go for years without considering a program’s performance to be an…
973
Python 3.12.0 from a supply chain security perspective
This critical role would not be possible without funding from the OpenSSF Alpha-Omega Project. Massive thank-you to Alpha-Omega for investing in the security of the Python ecosystem! Python ...
974
Adding runtime benchmarks to the Rust compiler benchmark suite
This post describes the design and implementation of a runtime benchmark suite for measuring the performance of Rust programs, which was recently added into the Rust compiler suite. I have recently blogged about how the whole benchmark suite works, so feel free to read that post first if you want to gather a bit more…
975
Algebraic graph calculus (2021)
We describe a graph-theoretic analogue of vector calculus. The linear operators of vector calculus (gradient, divergence, laplacian) correspond to the matrices naturally associated to graphs (incidence matrix, adjacency matrix). This analogy is useful for formalizing the discretization of some problems in image and…
976
Queues should be empty
I’ve been writing a pubsub listener for work recently and had this silly “shower thought”: the ideal queue should be empty. Why? If the queue is not empty, it means that whatever job is consuming from the queue is not keeping up with messages coming into it. Ok, then if queues are supposed to be empty, then what are…
977
What to expect from your framework
There's been a bit of a brouhaha these last weeks as parts of the Internet suddenly woke up to the realization that most Single Page Apps are slow and overcomplicated, and — shock horror — it turns out that Facebook, the lovable scamps that brought us React and QAnon, have conducted themselves badly! Refreshingly…
978
Bfs 3.0: The Fastest Find Yet
bfs is a tool I wrote to do b readth- f irst s earch through a filesystem. It started out simply enough, but over the years it’s grown to include almost every feature from every other find implementation I could find, plus many of its own innovations. The new 3.0 release series includes the biggest new feature so far…
979
Making sense of React Server Components
This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an…
980
MutexProtected: A C++ Pattern for Easier Concurrency
In this post, we will discuss the challenges of programming with locks and how the C++ language offers some useful tools to make it easier. We will start with an example in C and then use C++ to improve upon it in steps. The example APIs are based on real-life APIs from the SerenityOS kernel.
981
Storing data in pointers
Some notes on storing data in pointers and the impact of >48-bit virtual addresses
982
Why Learn Compilers (2021)
A sufficient understanding of computers is impossible without learning how compilers and their parts work. It is like stepping into the computer's mind and seeing how it feels from the inside. Compil...
983
Custom Allocators in Rust
Posts and writings by Nical
984
Link-Time Optimisation (LTO)
I recently started exploring link-time optimisation (LTO), which I used to think was just a single boolean choice in the compilation and linking workflow, and perhaps it was like that a while ago… I’ve learned that these days, there are many different dimensions of LTO across compilers and linkers today and more…
985
Interactive Common Lisp Development
Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”. In most languages, modifications to your program are applied by recompiling it and restarting it. In contrast, Common Lisp lets…
986
A very subtle bug (2010)
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience…
987
A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)
Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.
988
Street Fighter II, subtile accurate animation (2021)
This article is the final part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
989
Scaffolded LLMs as natural language computers
Recently, LLM-based agents have been all the rage – with projects like AutoGPT showing how easy it is to wrap an LLM in a simple agentic loop and prompt it to achieve real-world tasks. More generally, we can think about the class of ‘scaffolded’ 1 LLM systems – which wrap...
990
Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit
Joel Gustafson