1711
Mutexes are faster than Spinlocks
(at least on commodity desktop Linux with stock settings)
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,532 posts.
1712
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…
1713
Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community
I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree. I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back…
1714
1715
Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017
I'm awarded the Swedish Polhem Prize 2017. (Link to a Swedish-speaking site.) The Polhem Prize (Polhemspriset in Swedish), is awarded "for a high-level technological innovation or an ingenious solution to a technical problem." The Swedish innovation must be available and shown competitive on the open market. This…
1716
Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things
You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it. Even though it is used by a…
1717
Good at programming competitions does not equal good on the job [video]
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
1718
German for Programmers
After 2 years of learning German I’ve noticed that, for the most part, you can go a long way by mapping foreign concepts to ones that you already know. In particular, I’ve had success mapping aspects of German grammar to programming concepts I use every day. After all, programmers deal with weird grammars all the…
1719
Rust 2021: GUI
This is a response to the Rust call for blogs 2021 and also a followup to last year’s entry. It will be entirely focused on GUI.
1720
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...
1721
Interesting commands for the Linux shell
List of 30 interesting commands and tips for the Linux shell that I have collected over the years.
1722
A Hacker’s Guide to Git
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
1723
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…
1724
Rewriting m4vgalib in Rust
If this isn’t your first time visiting my blog, you may recall that I’ve spent the past several years building an elaborate microcontroller graphics demo using C++.
1725
1726
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
1727
The State of Apple's Developer Documentation
It appears that most of the old iOS conceptual documents have been moved to the documentation archive and are now unsupported.
1728
My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018)
Finding the median in a list seems like a trivial problem, but doing so in linear time turns out to be tricky. In this post I’m going to walk through one of my favorite algorithms, the median-of-medians approach to find the median of a list in deterministic linear time. Although proving that this algorithm runs in…
1729
Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)
it's not working
1730
1731
If not React, then what?
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
1732
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.
1733
Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
After careful consideration, we’ve decided on a meaningful way to use the generous donations from our community: funding longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce.
1734
A regular expression to check for prime numbers (2007)
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.
1735
If your code accepts URIs as input, filter out “file://”
There are many online sites that accept reading input from remote locations. For example a site might try to extract all the text from a webpage, or show you the HTTP-headers a given server sends back in response to a request.
1736
1737
Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
a blog post by @azwinkau
1738
Things to learn in React before using Redux
Facts about React that should be known before using Redux (or MobX). Most important: Learn React first, then opt-in Redux but only if you need it. There are various techniques in React.js for scaling your local state management. Only if these are not sufficient, use a library like Redux ...
1739
Gzip + poetry = awesome
Day 16: gzip + poetry = awesome
1740
Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
A riveting tale of how good data can lead to bad decisions.