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Reversing the Petya ransomware with constraint solvers
With the advent of anonymous online money transactions (read Bitcoin ) ransomware has become a profitable business in the cybercrime indu...
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 780 posts.
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How to stop functional programming
You go into work and discover that a coworker isn't happy with some code you wrote because they don't understand it. They go to your manager and tell them that you're being a problem by writing code they don't understand. Your manager, being very skilled in conflict resolution, makes a technical decision to avoid…
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Visualizing How Developers Rate Their Own Programming Skills
As it turns out, there is no correlation between programming ability and the frequency of Stack Overflow visits.
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Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
A while ago, I bought the book “ The Go Programming Language ” written by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan. I have always been a fan of Brian Kernighan’s writings. I should admit that I bought the book mainly for his great examples and writings than for the Go language itself, but since then have got interested in the…
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Voronoi Diagrams on the GPU
Software Engineer at Figma. Previously at Dropbox. Studied Math/CS at Brown University.
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A x64 OS #1: UEFI
I briefly cover what it takes to start writing a kernel which bootstraps in UEFI, as opposed to BIOS.
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Why Clojure? (2010)
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
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Easy Scalable Text Rendering on the GPU
This post describes the text rendering algorithm I used on thetamath.com, a GPU-powered 2D equation renderer I wrote for fun last December…
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LL and LR in Context: Why Parsing Tools Are Hard (2013)
In my last blog entry LLand LR Parsing Demystified, we explored LL and LR parsers from ablack-box perspective. We arrived at a model for these parsers whereb...
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Advanced programming languages (2009)
Students often ask for a recommendation on what language they should learn next. If you're looking for a job in industry, my reply is to learn whatever is hot right now: C++, Java and C#--and probably Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl too.
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$15 Production Kubernetes Cluster on DigitalOcean
As you might already know, I’m into containers , static configuration and self-service infrastructures . Naturally, I love Kubernetes , which I consider the most promising cluster scheduler around.
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Verifying ARM processors against the official ARM specification
Researcher at Intel
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Lumo – A fast, standalone ClojureScript REPL that runs on Node.js and V8
One common complaint of Clojure REPLs is their [startup time](http://puredanger.github.io/tech.puredanger.com/2013/12/01/clj-problems/). Although that complaint is often somewhat unfounded (and related to tooling), it still takes the bare Clojure JAR about 1 second to start on new hardware…
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AWS Java documentation is fucked
Update: Eron Hennessey from Amazon has responded below with a new updated Java SDK that’s much easier to grok. The title of this article has since been changed accordingly. The problem…
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Why do we keep building rotten foundations?
APIs are like bones: sometimes you have to break them to mend them, and it fucking hurts. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it reflects an observation of (superficially) pragmatic behavioural t…