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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in coll…
The vertical scrolling effect in the original “The Legend of Zelda” relies on manipulating the NES graphics hardware in a manner that was likely unintended by its designers.
Load Balancers plays a key role in Web Architecture. In this post we are going to develop a simple load balancer with power of Go
Discussions: Hacker News (366 points, 21 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (256 points, 18 comments) Translations: Chinese 1, Chinese 2, Japanese, Korean The NumPy package is the workhorse of data analysis, machine learning, and scientific computing in the python ecosystem. It vastly simplifies manipulating and…
This article is based on my GopherCon Singapore 2019 presentation. In the presentation I referenced material from my post on declaring variables and my GolangUK 2017 presentation on SOLID design . For brevity those parts of the talk have been elided from this article. If you prefer, you can watch the recording of the…
Compilers, interpreters, runtimes, and the like can sometimes feel vaguely magical. They take your code, perform complex transformations that you only partially understand, and spit out an executable binary. Clearly, the inner workings of such a beast must contain arcane secrets, not meant for the minds of mortals.
These structures are so universal that most research papers in the theory of computation, programming languages and formal methods present concepts in terms of discrete mathematics rather than code.
How to combine data spread over two CSV files, like separate tables in a normalized relational database.
A change starts with a story.
I am starting to realize that the Unix command-line toolbox can fix absolutely any problem related to text wrangling. Let me tell you about a problem I had, and how I used some Unix command-line utilities to solve it.
Algebraic Structures are something I wish I’d understood better, sooner. I had a hazy idea of what they were, but didn’t know the correct terminology. That was a massive barrier to finding out more. This article is my attempt to stop that happening to others. We’ll look at: What are algebraic structures? How do we use…
I’m very proud to announce the completion of my first programming language compiler! Malcc is an incremental and ahead-of-time lisp compiler written in C. This is the story of my progress over the years and what I learned in the process. An alternate title for this post is: “How to Write a Compiler in Ten Years or…
This is an announcement regarding the resolution of the syntax for the await operator in Rust. This is one of the last major unresolved questions blocking the stabilization of the async/await feature, a feature which will enable many more people to write non-blocking network services in Rust. This post contains…
A summary of my undying love for LD_PRELOAD.
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
The issue to stabilize an initial version of async/await in Rust has left final comment period. The feature looks slated to stabilize in an upcoming release, most likely 1.39. This represents the culmination of an enormous amount of work by people all over the Rust community. But it’s also only the beginning of…
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
In 2007 I wrote a pair of modding tools, binitools , for a space trading and combat simulation game named Freelancer . The game stores its non-art assets in the format of “binary INI” files, or “BINI” files. The motivation for the binary format over traditional INI files was probably performance: it’s faster to load…
Two fun things happened recently and the proximity of the two made something go click in my head and now I think I understand how bytecode interpreters work.
Discussions: Hacker News (347 points, 37 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (151 points, 19 comments) Translations: Chinese (Simplified), French, Korean, Portuguese, Russian “There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that…
For the first time in almost a year, I brushed up on my C fundamentals and built a few toy programs. As I played around with pointers and printed out a memory location, I experienced a literal chill down my spine. I had almost forgotten how marvelous programming in this language was.
In my position I probably shouldn’t have a favorite AWS product, just like you shouldn’t have a favorite child. I do have a fave service but fortunately I’m not an (even partial) parent; so let’s hope that’s OK. I’m talking about Amazon Simple Queue Service , which nobody ever calls by its full name.
An in-depth description of the React programming model.
I’ve had Elixir on the brain recently. And by recently I probably mean 2 years. In my defense I think it is fair to say it is blooming right now. I haven’t had much need of it, or opportunity for it, in my day-to-day of maintaining a Python legacy system, renewing another legacy or optimizing Elasticsearch. So I’ve…
