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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, DbgRs could finally set breakpoints. That was the last really critical feature needed for controlling execution of a program. Now that it can stop on an arbitrary function or code location, the next step is to find more information about…
Welcome to my new site, brought to you by vanilla everything. No Javascript frameworks, CSS libraries or flashy animations. Just markdown, html templa...
Foreign keys are a bit like that well-intentioned friend who insists on double-checking everything you do. They’re often recommended as a must-have for enforcing referential integrity checks in your database.
Historical reference to Ian Denhardt’s A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language (2019-06-25), with archive and current documentation links.
YOLO-driven development - not for the faint of heart
In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are di...
Combobulate is a package that adds advanced structured editing and movement to many programming modes in Emacs. Here's how it works, and how it can enrich your editing experience in Emacs.
Without shooting yourself in the foot, learning lacks motivation. Complexity without reason is really confusing.
λm.me - An alternative frontend for Haskell?
This is a set of tips/tricks for learning and using pytest.
Much has been written about how to generate random 64-bit integers; people might argue over which particular (CS)PRNG is best suited for a given task, but there is agreement on the general shape of the solution: keep some state around, and then extract 64 bits of randomness at a time, where each bit is equally likely…
Don’t worry … it’s super easy 🙃
Git can “trace the evolution” of a specific method, showing you logs of how it has changed over time.
Bootstrapping OCaml projects with Nix
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
A common assumption I see on the ‘net is that NP-complete problems are impossible to solve. I recently read that dependency management in Python is hard because package resolution is NP-complete. This is true in principle, but the reality is more complicated. When we say “NP-complete is hard” we’re talking about…
I came across a question: How does one efficiently solve Two Sum in C? There’s a naive quadratic time solution, but also an amortized linear time solution using a hash table. Without a built-in or standard library hash table, the latter sounds onerous. However, a mask-step-index table , a hash table construction…
So here’s a well-known optimization trick that also tells you a bit about how GPUs work.
There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this …
Designing a language, types first
Creating application binaries for Linux that run on a wide range of distributions is a bit tricky, as different distributions ship different versions of various system libraries. These are usually backwards compatible, but not forwards compatible, so programs linked against older versions of the libraries also work…
I got this idea after reading the Reflections on GoodJob for Solid Queue from Ben Sheldon, who is the author of the excellent GoodJob.
A brief overview of our study of abstract-syntax-tree and bytecode interpreters on top of RPython and the GraalVM metacompilation systems.
Forget programs. The most important productivity tool for programming is your mind. And the next best set of software development tools are ones that take care of you. It isn’t about Git. Or Docker. Or testing frameworks. These are all useful tools. I use them daily. But they are not the most important software…
Lucas Pluvinage's website
They provide a safety net when making changes, and give you that nice, warm feeling when you see them all pass after a change.
Experiments, technology, and thoughts on life.
Checking my assumptions about syncable data structures
