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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,532 posts.
This post is the first of many to come on Apache Arrow, pandas, pandas2, and the general trajectory of my work in recent times and into the foreseeable future. This is a bit of a read and overall fairly technical, but if interested I encourage you to take the time to work through it.
A week ago, I finally got round to implementing an idea I’d been toying with for years: what if your computer made a little bit of noise every time it sent data to Google? From studying logs, I’d long known just how many sites send all your visits and clicks to (at least) Google, but a log that you have to manually…
How to use Python to generate 3D SVG.
New zine: The Pocket Guide to Debugging
By Gremlins, For Gremlins™
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
An overview of the tools and environment Stripe engineers used to write and test code, as of 2019 or so.
<p>For years I’ve noodled around with various setups for a Python development environment. A couple of years ago <a href="https://jacobian.org/2018/feb/21/python-environment-2018/">I wrote about a setup I finally liked</a>; this is an update to that post.</p> <p>Bad news: this stuff still isn’t stable, and…
To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
Some of the interesting and insane facts I learned about SQLite
WebGPU is an upcoming Web API that gives you low-level, general-purpose access GPUs.
A collection of advanced Python features that I've found interesting, underrated, or unique - as someone who's seen a lot of Python code.
For the past few months, I have been working on a project called CAMLBOY, a Game Boy emulator that runs in the browser.
Learning new language or framework can sometimes be a struggle. Traditional approach is to read documentation which explains the concepts, and provides simple examples. Sometimes that might be enough, but what those documentations are often lacking are some advanced examples and usages in real projects.
If there is one pattern this book couldn’t live without, this is it. Game loops are the quintessential example of a “game programming pattern”. Almost every game has one, no two are exactly alike, and relatively few programs outside of games use them.
Hatching... Cursor Shenanigans Cursor, my beloved, started rate limiting shenanigans a few days back. For a good 2 weeks after June 16, 2025, we had almo...
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...
Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel ...
Today I landed yet another small change to libcurl internals that further reduces the number of small mallocs we do. This time the generic linked list functions got converted to become malloc-less (the way linked list functions should behave, really). Instrument mallocs I started out my quest a few weeks ago by…
A detailed blog post on optimizing multi-threaded matrix multiplication for x86 processors to achieve OpenBLAS/MKL-like performance. Tags: High-performance GEMM on CPU, Fast GEMM on CPU, High-performance matrix multiplication on CPU, Fast Matrix Multiplication on CPU, Matrix multiplication in C, GEMM in C, Matrix…
I don’t know what you were doing on 25th of December 2022. I was eating pierogis, while Ruby team did some epic sh***!
When Git first came onto the scene in the mid 2000's, I was initially skeptical because of its horrible user interface. But once I learned it, I appreciated its speed and features - especially the ease at which you could create feature branches, merge, and even create commits offline (which was a big deal in the era…
The target system was a distributed data processing platform that ran across hundreds of thousands of machines. At such scales, a 0.5% improvement would easily make up my salary going forward, and 2% was a good result for the half.
It’s not every day where students new to programming get to ask 709 software developers for advice. Overview There is a school here in Malmö, Sweden called The Game Assembly. This school focuses on teaching students game production. Everything from programming to art and design. This is a three year...
We show that a system that has only GNU's find and mkdir commands is Turing-complete.
This post describes how to write a simple Hello world bootloader
