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Let’s Invent B(+)-Trees
Say we have some things, and we want to be able to store and look them up in order. We could just put them in a big sorted array:
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
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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.
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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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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.
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Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
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…
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Monospace: A JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the demo competition
MONOSPACE: Flip dots with feelings, a JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the 1024 bytes demo competition at Assembly 2020.
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The use of `class` for things that should be simple free functions
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.
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Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet
tldr: work has started to make Hyper work as a backend in curl for HTTP. curl and its data transfer core, libcurl, is all written in C. The language C is known and infamous for not being memory safe and for being easy to mess up and as a result accidentally cause security problems. At … Continue reading rust in curl…
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Shitlist Driven Development (2016)
Recently the team I work with completed a project to allow Shopify to run in multiple datacenters . This project was a refactoring project in disguise. When you undertake large refactoring of a code-base with 100s of developers and 100,000s of lines of code, you can’t align by sending an email. The merge-conflicts a…
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CRDTs: The Hard Parts [video]
A talk at Hydra distributed computing conference , online (originally planned to be in Moscow, Russia), 06 Jul 2020
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I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS
A guide on how to compile the X Window System for iOS
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Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant
Sharing my thoughts on userscripts, a phenomenon the swept the internet back in the 00s.
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A Complete Guide to LLVM for Programming Language Creators
We'll explain the concepts underlying LLVM IR, and how you can use the LLVM C++ API in your programming language's compiler.
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On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
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How GPT3 Works – Visualizations and Animations
Discussions: Hacker News (397 points, 97 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (247 points, 27 comments) Translations: German, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Turkish The tech world is abuzz with GPT3 hype. Massive language models (like GPT3) are starting to surprise us with their abilities. While not yet…
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On the shoulders of the giants
Hands-on technical leader, Rust expert.
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Let's build a full-text search engine
Full-Text Search is one of those tools people use every day without realizing it. If you ever googled "golang coverage report" or tried to find "indoor wireless camera" on an e-commerce website, you used some kind of full-text search.
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Non-Posix File Systems
Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX . They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened…