91
Was Rust Worth It?
From JavaScript to Rust, three years in.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
92
GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?
How to use GNU Parallel to gather stats on long-running flaky tests by running them many times and capturing their results.
93
94
{n} times faster than C
Owen's personal website and portfolio
95
How to start a Go project in 2023
I previously wrote about starting a Go project in 2018. A lot has changed since I wrote that and I had been wanting to write an updated version. What follows should be enough for anyone new to Go to …
96
Accidentally Load Bearing
Sometimes people will talk about Chesterton's Fence, the idea that if you want to change something—removing an apparently useless fence—you should first determine why it was set up that way: The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly…
97
Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch
Another explainer on a fun, esoteric topic: optimizing code with SIMD (single instruction multiple data, also sometimes called vectorization ). Designing a good, fast, portable SIMD algorithm is not a simple matter and requires thinking a little bit like a circuit designer.
98
HTML Web Components
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to…
99
I Hacked the Magic Mouse
Magic Mouse hack with USB-C charger
100
Patterns for building LLM-based systems and products
Evals, RAG, fine-tuning, caching, guardrails, defensive UX, and collecting user feedback.
101
SQL should be the default choice for data transformation logic
SQL should be the first option considered for new data engineering work. It’s robust, fast, future-proof and testable. With a bit of care, it’s clear and readable.
102
All you may need is HTML
Readers occasionally request which static HTML generator is used by fabiensanglard.net , and if they can take the same stylesheet/ fonts to start their own blog. I usually send back the whole 134 lines of gen.php [1] and invite them to copy whatever they need to get started [2] .
103
Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad
If you have a QA team, please read this and give them a large raise.
104
Functions are vectors
Conceptualizing functions as infinite-dimensional vectors lets us apply the tools of linear algebra to a vast landscape of new problems, from image and geometry processing to curve fitting and machine learning.
105
106
Driver adventures for a 1999 webcam
We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frustrating reason to have to get rid of something is that drivers stop being made for devices.
107
Twenty-five years of curl
Time flies when you are having fun. Today is curl's 25th birthday. The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years. It scratched a personal itch of mine, Me back then I made that first curl release and I've packaged … Continue reading…
108
Rant: Year of Linux on the desktop
A rant about "year of Linux on the desktop" from a tired old man. I've been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there's been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more…
109
I'm skeptical of low-code
Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing
110
No Start Menu for You
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) th…
111
Moving fast with the core Vim motions
Where you learn the power of motions and how you can move blazingly fast and with extreme prevision using VSCodeVim
112
Software 2.0 (2017)
I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they…
113
CLI text processing with GNU awk
Example based guide to mastering GNU awk
114
115
Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK)…
116
How small is the smallest .NET Hello World binary?
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string"Hello, World!" to the standard output?
117
Java 21 makes me like Java again
Algebraic data types in Java.
118
Linear code is more readable
Code linearity is more desireable than keeping abstraction layers separate.
119
Simply explained: How does GPT work?
By now, you have probably heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or any of the alternatives GPT-3, GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Facebook’s LLaMa or even Google’s Bard. They are artificial intelligence programs that can participate in a conversation. Impressively smart, they can easily be mistaken for humans, and are skilled in a…
120