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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
One of the first types we learn about is the boolean. It's pretty natural to use, because boolean logic underpins much of modern computing. And yet, it's one of the types we should probably be using a lot less of. In almost every single instance when you use a boolean, it should be something else.
Personal blog of Omar Abid
Best of both worlds: Building an AI gatekeeper that knows exactly which tests to run for your code changes
At hackArcana, we deliver professional educational content authored by world-class experts in programming, binary analysis, and cybersecurity.
A lesson in X11, networking, and design.
Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excellent The Discoverers , which I’d strongly recommend.
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the starting point of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code. Update: It turns out that there’s a…
Every AI tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and the only way to discover what they are is by using them.
An deep dive into a pathological case.
In a real world benchmark, the default musl allocator caused a 7x slowdown compared to other allocators. I recommend all Rust projects immediately swap to a different allocator in a musl environment.
prompt engineering is nothing but an attempt to reverse-engineer a non-deterministic black box for which any of the parameters below are unknown: - training set - weights - constraints on the model - layers between you and the model that transform both your input and the model's output that can change at any time …
There is a pattern I’ve learned while using Zig which I’ve never seen used in any other language. It’s an extremely simple trick which - when applied to a data structure - reduces memory usage, reduces memory allocations, speeds up accesses, makes freeing instantaneous, and generally makes everything much, much…
For the past five months I've been leading the efforts to rebuild Zed 's cloud infrastructure.
Learn how to extend the classic XOR trick to find thousands of missing values using Invertible Bloom Filters
written by - Akshat Joshi Sometime back, I set myself a crazy constraint: Load only one thing at boot - A Pong game that fits in one floppy disk sector — 512 bytes. Why would I build this? I have played with Operating Systems and their workings by customizing them and tweaking their
Dear readers, we are extremely sad to inform you that Rainer passed away on October 6, 2025, surrounded by his closest family. After suffering from life-threatening pneumonia, Rainer decided against further life-sustaining measures that would have severely restricted his life. He passed away peacefully, accompanied by…
In my previous post I introduced SQL virtual tables and how to use them in Go—registering modules per connection, defining schemas, and querying external sources as regular tables.
Lessons on incentives and scaling from two years as a teaching assistant
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities. This article…
Disclaimer: This story took place when I was a junior developer for a previous employer ages ago. Some details might be fuzzy, and goes without saying this is entirely from my own POV so take everything here with humor and a grain of salt.
As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested…
While browsing Reddit the other day waiting for my code to compile, I ran across this question on r/Python: is hash(-1) == hash(-2) an easter egg? Wait, is that really true? $ python Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 29 2021, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.1.1 20210531 (Red Hat 11.1.1-3)] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or…
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
"I love C". "I enjoy writing in C". "I don't feel well when I have passed a day without coding a line of C". "My conversation with my wife simply doesn't flow without the C language". "I want to write everything in C, even the everyday scripting, but due to the steps required for writing make files and other things, I…
This post describes how to compile a single C++ source file to an object file with the Clang API. Here is the code. It behaves like a simplified clang executable that handles -c and -S…
I’ve invested in a new odometer to help my car go faster. Accountability is important, and as a driver I believe the most important thing I can do is set measurable, achievable and inspiring goals for the people pushing my car down the road.
28 . That's the minimum number of AND or OR operators you need in order to write any Boolean function of five variables. Alex Healy and I computed that in April 2010. Until then, I believe no one had ever known that little fact. This post describes how we computed it and how we almost got scooped by Knuth's Volume 4A…
Originally published May 20, 2015.
Alternative configuration formats solve superficial problems. Configuration languages solve the deeper problem: the need for abstraction.
