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Put the DVD logo in the corner (2023)
A blog about making a game to achieve my childhood dream (of getting the DVD logo in the corner)
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
1322
What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
In shell scripting you sometimes come across comparisons where each value is prefixed with "x". Here are some examples from GitHub:
1323
An opinionated approach to GNU Make
Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.
1324
C++26 Disapproved
On October 23, 2026, the unthinkable happened. It was supposed to be a mere formality: C++26 was up for a vote by the ISO National Bodi...
1325
What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time working on it for long stretches of time…
1326
Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby
Elixir is not Ruby. The familiar syntax has definitely helped the language win the hearts of the broader developer community. Yet, under the hood, Elixir is all about Erlang.
1327
Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
If you've talked to me lately about AI, you've almost certainly been subject to a long soliloquy about the wonders of Claude Code. What started as a tool I ran in parallel with other tools to aid coding has turned into my full-fledged agentic operating system, supporting all kinds of workflows.
1328
In Praise of AutoHotKey
People think it’s weird that I do all my development on a Windows machine. It’s definitely a second-class citizen experience in the wider development world, and Windows has a lot of really frustrating issues, but it’s still my favorite operating system. This is for exactly one reason: AutoHotKey. AHK is an engine for…
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Can gzip be a language model?
A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …
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Why do arrays start at 0?
It's not the reason you think. No, it's not that reason either.
1333
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?
1334
Please do not delete this commented-out version
Let me check, just how old is Emacs 10.31? According to the Emacs timeline Emacs 13.0x was the first public release - in 1985. Feel free to study the over 30 years old sources , simply because they’re significantly more readable than what’s making up expand-file-name these days.
1335
My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that …
1336
Typing the technical interview
In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling…
1337
Faking a JPEG
Creating something that seems like a JPEG, very quickly
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A Recipe for Training Neural Networks
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
1340
Java 21 makes me like Java again
Algebraic data types in Java.
1341
Linear code is more readable
Code linearity is more desireable than keeping abstraction layers separate.
1342
I write type-safe generic data structures in C
See my follow-up article: “A Fast, Growable Array With Stable Pointers in C” I write type safe generic data structures in C using a technique that I haven’t seen elsewhere1. It uses unions to associate type information with a generic data structure, but we’ll get to that. My approach works for any type of data…
1343
Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts
6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts
1344
Things every React.js beginner should know
I've been using React.js for about 6 months now. In the grand scheme of things that's not very long at all, but in the ever-churning world of JavaScript frameworks, that just about qualifies you as a bearded elder! I've helped out a few people lately with React starter tips, so I thought it would be a good idea to…
1345
Python Tools for Visual Studio
I've talked some about the sweet support for node and PHP in Azure. You can ...
1346
What they don't teach you about sockets
In order to effectively write applications that communicate via sockets, there were some realizations I needed to make that weren't explicitly told to me by any of the documentation I read.
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Planner programming blows my mind
Picat is a research language intended to combine logic programming, imperative programming, and constraint solving. I originally learned it to help with vacation scheduling but soon discovered its planner module, which is one of the most fascinating programming models I’ve ever seen. First, a brief explanation of…
1349
Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving
Dynamic programming has a reputation as a technique you learn in school, then only use to pass interviews at software companies. Indeed, most developers do not regularly work on problems where dynamic programming is needed. Ultimately, dynamic programming is a technique for efficiently solving problems that can be…
1350
Mercurial’s journey to and reflections on Python 3
Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008.