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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
This article will continue the layout module that we started in Part 5. This time, we’ll add the ability to lay out block boxes. These are boxes that are stack vertically, such as headings and paragraphs.
Hello everyone! Time for a bit of a diversion towards one of my favorite projects, Hy ! (I'm an occasional committer, but the main mastermind behind the project is my good friend Paul Tagliamonte .) For those of you who don't know, Hy is a Lisp that transforms into the Python AST. Even more fun: you can import .hy…
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…
Melrōse is both a language and a tool to create and listen to music interactively, The language uses musical primitives (note, sequence, chord) and many functions (map, group, transpose) that can be used to create more complex patterns, loops and tracks. Melrōse uses MIDI output to produce sound by any (hard or…
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
Dependently typed programming is becoming all the rage these days.Advocates are talking about all the neat stuff you can do by putting more and more informat...
A sparse matrix is a matrix that has a value of 0 for most elements. If the ratio of N umber of N on- Z ero ( NNZ ) elements to the size is less than 0.5, the matrix is sparse. While this is the mathematical definition, I will be using the term sparse for matrices with only NNZ elements and dense for matrices with all…
In this article, I will describe steps needed to start on with development of real UEFI applications on x86 PC, and share some practical experiences with problems doing so. I will focus on 64-bit version of UEFI, because the 32-bit version isn't much used in this area (most likely due to Microsoft decision not to…
PostgreSQL always allowed, by default, any user to connect to any database, and create new tables (and views, and so on) in “public" schema. The one that is created by default.
ImapGoose is a small program to keep local mailboxes in sync with an IMAP server. The wording “keep […] in sync” implies that it does so continuously, rather than a one-time sync. ImapGoose is designed as a daemon, monitoring both the IMAP server and the local filesystem, and immediately synchronising changes. When…
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
Follow me on Bluesky! A Log-Structured Merge tree, or LSM, is a popular data structure for storage engines. It’s what is used by RocksDB, which is sort of...
It’s already been a great reading day for retrospectives on the last ten years / predictions for the next. Here’s to hoping that everyone had a good break (or at least a few days off), set or didn’t set resolutions, and is refreshed and ready for what comes next.
Combinatris
Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…
I started work on mitmproxy because I was frustrated with the available interception tools. I had a long list of minor complaints - they were insufficiently flexible, not programmable enough, mostly written in Java (a language I don't enjoy), and so forth. My most serious problem, though, was opacity. The best tools…
A great moment has arrived. We are going to apply our neural networks implementation to a regression problem. The network is going to learn a known function,...
Craig Federighi: I always end up seeking back to figure out what part I missed where the podcast started, and then I realize it just starts.
The stage has been set for wrapping up the simplest version of a complete neural network API, and its key part that offers the entry for the /learning/ funct...
This post is about the AioContext lock removal in QEMU 9.0 (planned for release in 2024), how we got here, and what it means for multi-threa...
Optimizing compilers like to keep track of each IR instruction’s effects. An instruction’s effects vary wildly from having no effects at all, to writing a specific variable, to completely unknown (writing all state).
Bridging Discrete and Continuous Logic in Automated Reasoning Systems In this article we will explore the connection between Functional Programming and reasoning. Functional Programming is often ad…
As you all may know, I watched and posted my lecture notes of the whole MIT Introduction to Algorithms course. In this post I want to summarize all the topics that were covered in the lectures and point out some of the most interesting things in them. Actually, before I wrote this article, I had started writing an...
We usually learn that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 kilobytes, etc. But is this true or a kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
