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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
Over the past few years, I’ve interviewed with a dozen or so companies and have completed ~50 or so individual algorithm problems. I’m frequently given feedback that I did a great job at the algorithms problem. In this post, I’m going to share how exactly I approach algorithm problems. Thought Process A guiding…
How do you design good abstractions? By using abstractions that already exist.
A basic introduction to USB for people that don't need to know what happens on the wire
I don’t know about you, but nothing gets me going in the morning quite like a good old fashioned programming language rant. It stirs the blood to see someone skewer one of those “blub” languages the plebians use, muddling through their day with it between furtive visits to StackOverflow.
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…
In my old age I’ve mostly given up trying to convince anyone of anything. Most people do not care to find the truth, they care about what pumps their bags. Some people go as far as to believe that perception is reality and that truth is a construction. I hope there’s a special place in hell for those people.
Over the past 21 months I’ve written a code editor from the ground up, including: a fast (~120fps) canvas-based editor component; multi-language syntax highlighting with Tree-sitter; snippets; a file browser; find-and-replace with regex and JavaScript expression support; and two completely new features: AST mode and…
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
I am very proud to say that after about 10 months of work I finished writing my Emacs Lisp book . If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s called “Hacking your way around in Emacs” and it is an intermediate-level textbook on Emacs Lisp, showing a lot of useful things on about 100 pages.
An easy to follow, visual introduction to PyTorch.
Java has many features that make it well suited for large, long-lasting projects. But I find it surprisingly good for small tasks as well. Recent language features make it even better. The killer features are compile-time typing and great tool support.
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
This post talks about Ruby but it’s true of every language community: Python, JavaScript, Java, etc. The scourge of dependencies spares no one. This is a dependency visualization of every Rails app I’ve ever used. Does any of this sound familiar: Gemfile with 100s of entries. Test gems loading in production. Each…
For more information on the context behind this talk, see An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" .
MONOSPACE: Flip dots with feelings, a JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the 1024 bytes demo competition at Assembly 2020.
For those who only read above the fold: I don’t say that all object-orientation is bad! OOP, especially classical polymorphic OOP, has a well-deserved place in real code. I’m going to talk about a very specific antipattern that I see with some frequency: the use of class for things that should be simple free functions.
A blog post written by Lorentz Kinde. It's probably about something technical.
Please read this update instead: Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021) . This page is obsolete!
Suppose you have an appetite for tilting at windmills. Let's say you love pain. Well then why not write a PDF parser today?
For web automation/testing, Selenium has been the de facto "standard" since forever. It's simple to get started with and supports almost every programming language. My problem with it has been: It's good enough, but nothing more. It doesn't work that well with modern, Javascript framework heavy sites (Angular, React
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