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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
In Rust, there is this feature known as “pattern matching”, whereby you can take apart a piece of structured data by writing out patterns which bind to parts of it. This process is known as “destructuring”, because you’re breaking a structure into parts.
Why you should write more toy programs
Take a look at this Perl regular expression: perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^(11+?)\1+$/ && print "$_ is composite"' This regular expression matches only the composite numbers (and doesn't match prime numbers). Can you figure out how it works? I'll give the explanation below but try to figure it…
One of the main benefits of JavaScript is that it runs both in the browser and the server. As an engineer you need to master a single language and your skills w
A few years ago I blogged about custom tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting in emacs . I started out with highlighting certain keywords in...
A comprehensive guide on how to write good documentation for your code and libraries
a pungent monad odor that attracts mathochists
I recently learned Spotify provides downloads for users’ streaming history. For me, this is over 10 years worth of data, so at the very least it seemed like a good nostalgia trip. This post covers some of my analysis of my personal export, and hopefully is a good starting place if you’re interested in exploring your…
Last year at an internal talk at Facebook I was fortunate to see [John Carmack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack) speak about his idea generation system. At first I was disappointed because...
In the world of matching decompilation, projects use a tool which consumes an input binary and lifts objects for comparison and linkage.
Learn the command line, version control, build systems, and correctness in NEU’s CS 4973: ISDT.
In early October I gave a keynote at Python Brasil in Belo Horizonte. Here is an aspirational and lightly edited transcript of the talk. There is …
I happily dove into Quake World source code . Here is what I understood, hopefully it will help someone to swim. This article is in four parts : Architecture section Network section Prediction section Rendition section
Whether your game surfaces its numbers to the player or not, odds are it has underlying systems that rely on them, and you use functions to determine how those numbers affect each other. In other words, a mathematical function is usually at the core of the answer to a bunch of frequent game design questions.
To help crime analysts get started with python, I am early releasing Data Science for Crime Analysis with Python, an introductory book for analysts.
Discover various UNIX / Linux scripting tools that add GUI widgets, network sockets and add some spice to your UNIX bash shell scripts.
Nikolai Vazquez is a software engineer, designer, and musician.
If we are running any eBPF workload or writing eBPF code, we want to measure its performance impact, and in this post we will demonstrate an example of how to do it. In this example, our goal is to measure the performance of file open operations, one of the most critical functions in the OS. Our code used file open…
A 2026 sequel to C Constructs That Don't Work in C++: what still breaks, what C++20 changed, and what C23 changed.
Bart van Zon, software developer
Some personal reflections about the evolution and death or programming languages. By the forces a circumstances, I had to reverse engineer and decommission a few Perl scripts in an old company earl…
This blog post discusses a few alternative Rust-language memory models. I hope that this discussion is of value to the Rust community, but in the end, it is their language, so it is also their choice of memory model. This discussion takes the Rust fearless-concurrency viewpoint, tempered by…
