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Turing Machines
An interactive introduction to Turing machines, the theoretical foundation of modern computing.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
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What is the best pointer tagging method?
In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used…
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Recursion, continuations and trampolines (2017)
How is tail recursion different from regular recursion? What do continuations have to do with this, what is CPS, and how do trampolines help? This article provides an introduction, with code samples in Python and Clojure.
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Linear Algebra of Types (2019)
It gives my brain a pleasant thrum to learn new mathematics which mimics the algebra I learned in middle school. Basically this means that the new system has operations with properties that match those of regular numbers as much as possible. Two pretty important operations are addition and multiplication with the…
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Understanding React Compiler
Cache all the things. How React Compiler works under-the-hood.
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How GCC and Clang handle statically known undefined behaviour
Recently, we had a discussion in our team about undefined behaviour (UB) in C. For those unfamiliar: We say that a program has undefined behaviour when we write code where the language specification doesn't define what should happen during execution. That means compilers can do whatever they like if they encounter…
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Outsourcing Cost Boeing Billions (2019)
On October 29, 2018 Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 MAX 8 flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia, crashed into the sea 13…
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Boring Python: dependency management (2022)
*This post has been significantly updated since it was originally written. The most recent update was in September 2026; a …
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Compilers are too smart
Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…
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A few facts about POSIX
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Closed form arc length parametrization is impossible for quadratic Bézier curves
Bézier curves are widely used for defining vector graphics. They are basically polynomial parametric curves, but given in the Bernstein basis, which enables us to define the curve using control points. The first and last control point define the start and endpoint of the curves, the intermediate control points kind of…
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TIL: Some surprising code execution sources in bash
I ran across two surprising sources of code execution in bash (and probably other shells) recently.
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Bit Vectors and my first steps into assembly
Trying to speedup my lexer using lookups and bitvectors but simd was just a step to far for me.
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Compiling a Lisp (2020)
Overture to our small Lisp to x86-64 compiler
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Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
Creating standalone Linux applications with lone.
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Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle
There are two main aspects to compile times that matter to developers. Cold build times, when building from scratch and warm build times when you’ve already built and you’re rebuilding following an edit. This article focuses on warm build times, which for rapid iteration during development is what generally matters…
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Dissecting the gzip format (2011)
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
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PIDs: Creating Stable Control in Games
Using a game use-case to motivate and explain PIDs
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The LMAX Architecture (2011)
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
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Emacs: Contextual Interfaces in Casual Calc
A compelling idea in the Transient UI package is the ability to craft interfaces where commands specific to a context can be discovered and used. Such contextual interfaces enable a user to...
983
Space-filling curves, constructively
In 1890 Giuseppe Peano discovered a square-filling curve , and a year later David Hilbert published his variation . In those days people did not waste readers’ attention with dribble – Peano explained it all on 3 pages, and Hilbert on just 2 pages, with a picture!
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Lamport Clocks
Last weekend I wanted to get some inspiration to write some TLA+ spec and I got my hands back on the paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events...
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Don’t look down on print debugging
Print good, not bad!
987
The Dual Nature of Events in Event-Driven Architecture
Given that events play such a central role in event-driven architecture, there’s an astonishing lack of agreement on what should be contained in an event. This may be rooted in the fact that, depending on your perspective, events fulfill different purposes.
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Python Modern Practices
Good development practices for modern Python
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Linux Text Manipulation
learning a lot about sed, awk and other commands by making a spotify statusbar widget
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I added some optimizations to my compiler that turns Lisp into JavaScript
Smaller programs that do less work.