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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
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…
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
From a person who really shouldn't be giving others advice.
I was going through the release notes of the new Python 3.12 version the other day, and one item caught my attention in the deprecations section:datetime.datetime’s utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp()…
It’s well-known at this point that GPT-4/GPT-3.5-turbo is non-deterministic, even at temperature=0.0. This is an odd behavior if you’re used to dense decoder-only models, where temp=0 should imply greedy sampling which should imply full determinism, because the logits for the next token should be a pure function of…
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
Can’t Be Fucked Aussie slang for not wanting to, or not having the energy and motivation to do something. “Man, i really can’t be fucked changing the channel, let’s just watch Springer.” - Urban Dictionary
Over the last several years, I’ve rewritten Rust’s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata , which exposes much of the regex crate internals as their own APIs for…
A collection of specific ways to improve your use of Rust
Three years, two states, and one pandemic ago, I wrote about a very weird idea: what if the type system could track which data existed before a pure call, to eliminate its memory safety overhead? 0
By Gremlins, For Gremlins™
I don’t know what you were doing on 25th of December 2022. I was eating pierogis, while Ruby team did some epic sh***!
Update: I gave a talk on this topic at P99 CONF 2023 and at PyCon IL 2024 (Hebrew). A while ago at $work, we had a performance issue with one of our core Python …
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
This past month, I have been enthralled by the Rust programming language given its unique edge for writing memory-safe, modern programs. Over the years, several languages have emerged as the most preferred by engineers to write resilient, backend software. The tides have shifted from Java/C++ into Go and Rust, which…
Today is a great day for Emacs - Emacs 29.1 has just been released1! Every Emacs release is special, but I haven’t been so excited about a new version of Emacs in ages. Why so? Reason #1 - pure GTK front-end (a.k.a. pgtk). This also means that now Emacs supports natively Wayland. Which in tern means that it’s easier…
Hey HackerNews, let me just drop my mixtape, checkout my soundcloud and “Death Row” is the label that pays me. How is the Graph Database category supposed to grow when vendors keep spou…
State is where architectures rot. Learn why OO, functional, declarative, imperative, IoC, and monoliths are all fighting the same fire in systems.
How to make the Go runtime play nicely with the Linux Scheduler
git branches: intuition & reality
For today I only have a very short tip – or maybe let’s call it an anecdote. (This is not because I didn’t have time for writing last week. Quite the opposite – I’ve been working very hard on one of the projects I mentioned in my 2023 planning post . I think I’ll be able to share some details next week.)
Regular expressions are extremely powerful. This is something I read at least once or twice every day while reading articles and blogs on the Web.
I really enjoyed reading Algorithmic Trading: A Practitioner’s Guide by Jeffrey M. Bacidore. Before starting, I imagined it would cover various strategies for trading in the markets, along th…
As much as I loved the beautiful machine , the passive cooling and form factor of the DB4 chassis had limitations. The best GPU I could fit in (and cool down), a 1050 Ti, barely managed to run Diablo 2 Resurrected. Playing could become unpleasant at 30fps in busy levels!
