961
Loading Pydantic models from JSON without running out of memory
Pydantic’s JSON loading uses a huge amount of memory; here’s how to reduce it.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
962
Google Logo Ligature Bug
Jeffrey Yasskin recently pointed out an interesting security bug: The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users into thinking they were really interacting with Google. To see how…
963
How to make things slower so they go faster
In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align, e.g., after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or as a service returns from an outage, the bucketed arrival rate can
964
Lemma for the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory
This post illustrates a key lemma that is used in proving the fundamental theorem of Galois theory (FTGT). Note that FTGT is not covered in this post. The focus of this post is on understanding and proving this lemma only. Here is the lemma from the book Galois Theory , 5th ed. by Stewart (2023):
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Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
966
A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization
I recently went on a nice long SCUBA diving trip with my wife and daughters. Lots of diving implies lots of showers, and lots of showers means lots of shower-thoughts! [1] An especially interesting one I had turned into a nice way to visualize some aspects of the Collatz Conjecture.
967
Datalog in miniKanren
A browser with Wasm GC and tail call support is required for this demo. We recommend using either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
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Don't Be Afraid of Types
Types in coding projects are good. Don’t be afraid to create them when you need to.
970
Stability by Design
I think I figured out what’s stressing me out about programming in dynamically typed languages: It’s about always being unsure if using a library in a particular way is going to work and if minor version upgrades aren’t going to break your code.
971
Simpler Backoff
Exponential backoff with jitter is de rigeur for making service calls. This code, or something like it, probably looks really familiar: func do(ctx context.Context) error { const ( maxAttempts = 10 baseDelay = 1 * time.Second maxDelay = 60 * time.Second ) delay := baseDelay for attempt := range maxAttempts { err :=…
972
Context should go away for Go 2 (2017)
As usual, when a new blog post comes out on blog.golang.org, I’m all eager to read it as soon as possible. The most recent one, Contributors Summit, is a nice write-up on the issues that the Go contributors have been talking about. While reading it, I stumbled upon a sentence that made me write this post. Here is is…
973
The surprising struggle to get a Unix Epoch time from a UTC string in C or C++
So how hard could it be. As input we have something like Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. Trying to figure this out led me to discover many ‘surprise features’ and otherwise…
974
My Favorite C++ Pattern: X Macros (2023)
In this post, I talk about my favorite C/C++ pattern involving macros.
975
HTML whitespace is broken (2024)
A deep dive into HTML whitespace collapsing: How it works, why it sucks, how it should work, and how to deal with it.
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Why is D3 so Verbose?
Curious why D3.js code looks long and complicated? I quickly explain why D3 is verbose, how it gives developers control, and what makes it powerful for data visualisation.
977
The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
978
Constructing the Word's First JPEG XL MD5 Hash Quine
A walk through of building an image that displays its own MD5 Hash
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Build a Database in Four Months with Rust and 647 Open-Source Dependencies
Applications can append events directly to ScopeDB and query committed data without a separate ETL pipeline.
981
The story of Max, a real programmer
This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year…
982
Parse, Don’t Validate – Some C Safety Tips
“A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.” – Doug Linder
983
Better Know a Ruby Thing: Singleton Classes
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Attention Wasn't All We Needed
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
985
Zig and the design choices within
(From someone who has spent far too much time thinking about the designs of programming languages)
986
Delete tests
We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from holistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. After all that time and several supposedly superseding movements, the developers I talk to seem to have developed a folk wisdom around tests. That consensus seems to boil down to…
987
Writing into Uninitialized Buffers in Rust
A blog by sunfishcode
988
Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk
A single-function JSON parser for the POSIX shell.
989
TLA+ Modeling Tips
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
990
Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…