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An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
This post has everything you need to know about xargs , an essential tool for shell programming . It's based on my # comments on this "wrong" post:
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,020 posts.
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Timezone Bullshit
People often use short timezone abbreviations like EST and PST to refer to timezones. If you're doing this in a computer program, you are almost certainly making a huge mistake. Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools , which you're almost certainly using under the hood if you're…
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Batteries included with Emacs (2020)
Emacs has a reputation for being borderline unusable out of the box, of being bloated but somehow surprisingly bare. This is largely a discoverability problem1. The solution the Internet has settled on seems to be “Emacs distributions” like Doom, Spacemacs or Prelude that glue together dozens (sometimes hundreds) of…
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On Repl-Driven Programming
Once upon a time, someone with the handle “entha_saava” posted this question on Hacker News :
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I wrote one of the fastest DataFrame libraries
At the time of writing this, the coronavirus has been in our country for a year, which means I have been sitting at home for a very long time. At the start of the pandemic, I had a few pet projects in Rust under my belt and I noticed that the “are we DataFrame yet” , wasn’t anywhere near my satisfaction. So I wondered…
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Don't encode POST bodies like GitHub Copilot, use URLSearchParams
Don't do it like GitHub Copilot!
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Remote code execution in Homebrew by compromising the official Cask repository
この記事は日本語でも投稿されています: https://blog.ryotak.net/post/homebrew-security-incident/ (もし日本語が読める場合、筆者は英語がそこまで得意ではないため、日本語の記事を読むことをお勧めします。) (Official blog post about this incident is available here: https://brew.sh/2021/04/21/security-incident-disclosure/) Preface Homebrew project is running a “Vulnerability Disclosure Program”…
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My Logging Best Practices (2020)
If you are a backend developer like me, logging is the window to your application. Unlike in the frontend, there’s not much to see except of your log messages. Here are some of my personal guidelines I use when I write logs.
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Text editing hates you too (2019)
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
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Why mmap is faster than system calls (2019)
When I ask my colleagues why mmap is faster than system calls, the answer is inevitably “system call overhead”: the cost of crossing the…
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Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code
Full-text search is everywhere. From finding a book on Scribd, a movie on Netflix, toilet paper on Amazon, or anything else on the web through Google (like [how to do your job as a software engineer](https://localghost.dev/2019/09/everything-i-googled-in-a-week-as-a-professional-software-engineer/)), you've searched…
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Quaternions
Introduction to quaternions and rotations in 3D.
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Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don…
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Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer
My exploration into making a 90s style fantasy console inspired by the PS1
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Scrape like the big boys
What it really takes to scrape without getting detected.
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Ruby vs. Python comes down to the for loop
Contrasting how each language handles iteration helps understand how to work effectively in either.
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Turning an old Amazon Kindle into a eInk development platform
I fancied getting an eink screen to use for future projects. I bought a wee one with a raspberry pi "hat" attached. However, I realised later that I could maybe just re-purpose an old Amazon Kindle eb…
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Software engineering research is a train wreck
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
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Apple M1 Assembly Language Hello World
Introduction Last week, we talked about using a new Apple M1 based Macintosh as a development workstation and how installing Apple’s development system XCode also installed a large number of open s…
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OO in Python is mostly pointless
Note from 2025 me - I largely still agree with myself - and I still see the same crappy OO code getting pumped out. The final point in "Exceptions" is worth emphasising more.
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The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
When M1 Macs were launched, a new GPU with iOS-like architecture started driving the external monitors. This meant that the old method for controlling monitors using DDC wouldn't work anymore. Apps like Lunar and MonitorControl had to find other ways to change the brightness of the monitors.
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Java Is Underhyped
The perspective of an ignorant computer science undergrad
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Consider SQLite
If you were creating a web app from scratch today, what database would you use? Probably the most frequent answer I see to this is Postgres, although there are a wide range of common answers: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc. Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?
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Backdooring Rust crates for fun and profit
Supply chains attacks are all the rage these days, whether to deliver RATs, cryptocurrencies miners, or credential stealers. In Rust, packages are called crates and are (most of the time) hosted on a central repository: https://crates.io for better discoverability. We are going to study 8 techniques to achieve Remote…