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LittleJS is 2D and 3D now
LittleJS just got the biggest update since it launched! It is still the small, fast, dependency-free HTML5 game engine it always was. Now it also has a full 3D renderer sharing the canvas with your…
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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Appending to a file from multiple processes
Suppose you have multiple processes appending output to the same file without explicit synchronization. These processes might be working in parallel on different parts of the same problem, or these might be threads blocked individually reading different external inputs. There are two concerns that come into play:
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Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix
I have come to appreciate coding agents to be valuable tools for working with computer program code in any capacity, such as learning about any program’s architecture, diagnosing bugs or developing proofs of concept. Depending on the use-case, reviewing each command the agent wants to run can get tedious and…
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Cognitive Biases in Programming
As developers, we’re familiar with the various problems that interfere with our productivity. But often we overlook the broad picture. Some…
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Tools I use: argparse builder
argparse builder is a web based graphical interface for quick creation of the argparse commandline switches for your python scripts.
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Comet is dead, long live websockets
I've just had a chance to play with the implementation of websockets in Googles Chrome browser. This post started me off. After a small am...
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Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE
In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…
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Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?
Recently I gave a guest lecture in a graduate level software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. This post is a sort of rough transcript of my talk. I live-…
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Compiler Design in C
Compiler Design in C Download a copy! My book Compiler Design in C is now, unfortunately, out of print. You can download a complete copy, with the above button (pdf 19.1Mb OCR/Searchable—thanks to Marvin Hernández for adding the OCR). If you don’t want to print it out (the book is 984 pages long), you can…
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Improving the performance of WAT parser
The personal blog of Pig Fang.
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Build a CMS, no forms allowed
You may have noticed that quite a lot is happening in the Midgard land. Nowadays Midgard2 itself is a generic content repository that can be used for both desktop and web applications. Midgard MVC is a generic web framework for PHP5 that can be used with Midgard2 or without it. And then there is Midgard Create, the…
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How to make sure no dynamic memory is used
How to disable heap (dynamic memory allocation) in an embedded application? This article goes into the details of linker files and how to detect dynamic memory allocation.
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Is Unicode Safe?
Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure.  — Bruce Schneier, 2000 Over the last 25 years Unicode has succeeded. It hasn't displaced all other character encodings, but it's clearly on its way there. It's supported widely enough that it's a compatible choice, new projects use it, and it's becoming the…
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Making all your integers positive with zigzag encoding
You sometimes feel the need to make all of your integers positive, without losing any information. That is, you want to map all of your integers from 'signed' integers (e.g., -1, 1, 3, -3) to 'unsigned integers' (e.g., 3,2,6,7). This could be useful if you have a fast function to compress integers that fails to ……
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What’s New In Emacs 24
Part one of my annotated NEWS file for Emacs 24
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Rust for JavaScript Developers – Pattern Matching and Enums
Part 4 covers pattern matching, destructuring, and enums
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Making the obvious code fast (2016)
Jonathan Blow of “The Witness” fame likes to talk about just typing the obvious code first. Usually it will turnout to be fast enough. If it doesn’t, you c...
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Knuth-Morris-Pratt string-searching algorithm: DFA-less version
You see, there are two memory accesses per one character of the input string (at average). Hence, the total number of all memory accesses can be len*2 at worst.
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Ruby's private keyword is weird
Ruby's `private` keyword means something different compared to basically all other object-oriented languages. Most other languages don't even have a feature matching what Ruby calls `private`, but incredibly, Scala does, which it calls `protected[this]` (meaning
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Computation Graphs and Graph Computation
Research has begun to reveal many algorithms can be expressed as matrix multiplication, suggesting an unrealized connection between linear algebra and computer science. I speculate graphs are the missing piece of the puzzle. Graphs are not only useful as cognitive aides, but are suitable data structures for a wide…
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TLA+ Action Properties
There’s not a whole lot on TLA+ technique out there: all the resources are either introductions or case studies. Good for people starting out, bad for people past that. I think we need to write more intermediate-level stuff, what Ben Kuhn calls Blub studies. Here’s an attempt at that. Most TLA+ properties are…
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Everything Is an X
Analysis and examples of the popular high-level pattern of making all the things in your system conform to a common interface.
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Iterated Log Coding
I've created a new format for encoding real numbers on computers. I'm proud of it! Let's dive in.
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An EPYC NixOS Build Farm
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.