11851
Building My Own Yahoo Pipes
Pipes has been dead since 2015 or so, but I used it for a long time and it was essential to my daily news intake, so I’ve been building a personal ...
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
11852
Prefix sum on portable compute shaders
This is a followup to my previous post, prefix sum on Vulkan. Last year, I got a fancy algorithm for this problem running well on one device. This time, I will dive into the question of how to make it work well across a wide range of devices. The short answer is, it can be made to work pretty portably on Vulkan and…
11853
Lossless Float Image Compression
Back in 2021 I looked at OpenEXR lossless compression options (and I think my findings led a change of the default zip compression level , as well as change of the compression library from zlib to libdeflate . Yay blogging about things!) . Then in 2023 I looked at losslessly compressing a bunch of floating point data…
11854
Measuring memory usage in Python: it’s tricky
Measuring your Python program’s memory usage is not as straightforward as you might think. Learn two techniques, and the tradeoffs between them.
11855
Prospecting for Hash Functions
Update 2022 : TheIronBorn has found even better permutations using a smarter technique. That thread completely eclipses my efforts in this article.
11856
We can do better than line-buffered output
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
11857
11858
Five bugs in a single line of JavaScript
Today I've been working with a piece of third-party software. I was having big problems getting it working and decided to delve into its ...
11859
The Fast Fourier Transform
It’s often said that the Age of Information began on August 17, 1964 with the publication of Cooley and Tukey’s paper, “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier…
11860
Visualizing dynamic programming
I’ve always thought dynamic programming was a pretty crummy name for the practice of storing sub-calculations to be used later. Why not call it table-filling algorithms , because indeed, thinking of a dynamic programming algorithm as one that fills in a table is a quite good way of thinking about it.
11861
Revisiting 'Monadic Parsing in Haskell'
‘Monadic Parsing in Haskell’ is a short paper that laid the groundwork for libraries like Parsec and Attoparsec. Although it was published in 1998 (almost 20 years ago!) it has aged gracefully and the code samples will run with almost no changes. However, the state of the art has advanced since then and I think the…
11862
11863
Rotating Quine
My Quines are sometimes specialized for Japanese. But to attend RubyConf, I should write "global" Quines. v=0000;eval$s=%q~d=%!^Lcf<LK8, ...
11864
Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir
Today, I'm publishing a new book: Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir . It's my third book, the second one that is not self-published.
11865
Links 2013
I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box. But I can show you some of the pieces that snapped into place this year, and try to share a context for why they mattered so much to me.
11866
Why you should wait on upgrading to .Net 4.6
Update (August 11th): A patch for this bug has been released by Microsoft. Here’s their update to the advisory: We released an updated version of RyuJIT tod...
11867
Matrix Core Programming on AMD GPUs
In this blog post, we walk through how to use Matrix Cores in HIP kernels, with a focus on low-precision data types such as FP16, FP8, and FP4, as well as the new family of Matrix Core instructions with exponent block scaling introduced in the AMD CDNA™4 architecture. Through code examples and illustrations, we…
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11869
X is justifiably slow (2022)
I regularly hear or read statements like this: “X is slow but this is to be expected because it needs to do a lot of work”. It can be said about an application or a component in a larger system, and can refer to other resources that aren’t time. I often find these profoundly unhelpful as they depend much more on the…
11870
Coding Like a Girl
(this was originally given as a talk at AlterConf in Oakland)
11871
The Decline of Django
Let's face it, it’s not very exciting to be a Django developer today.
11872
11873
The lack of a case against Python 3
A point-by-point rebuttal of Zed Shaw's Unicode and 2to3 complaints, with a trainer's view on which Python version to teach beginners in 2016.
11874
Stop hating Java
I noticed that in the Ruby community “Java” is a synonym of pure evilness. It’s often used as an argument against some techniques. “It’s J...
11875
11876
You say “cave dweller debugging”, I say debug logging
There are still many situations where it's not feasible to stop a process, attach the debugger, and start futzing with memory. We can argue over whether this is because the industry didn't learn enough from the Pharo folks later. For now, let's pretend that's axiomatic: a certain amount of debugging (and even testing)…
11877
Big-Endian Testing with QEMU
In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.
11878
They Called It LISP for a Reason: List Processing (2005)
Lists play an important role in Lisp--for reasons both historical and practical. Historically, lists were Lisp's original composite data type, though it has been decades since they were its only such data type. These days, a Common Lisp programmer is as likely to use a vector, a hash table, or a user-defined class or…
11879
Best Practices – Why I Hate Them
I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.
11880
My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks