Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
Aerc is a TUI email client. It had its first release ~4 years ago. This makes it a “baby” compared to most of its “competitors” (Pine was released in 1992, Mutt in 1995). I heard about this program shortly after its first release but ignored it at the time, because I was still reasonably happy with Thunderbird and it…
There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python. The repo author, @BenjDicken, created a fun visualization of each language’s performance. Here’s one of the visualizations, which shows Ruby as the third slowest…
Reflecting on my most successful open source project.
Explores SQLite B-Tree index structure with visualizations, explaining on-disk and in-memory storage mechanisms
Recently, my team and I fixed an absolutely bizarre bug that only one person in the team could reproduce. And to make it even weirder, she was only able to reproduce the issue when using her work laptop at home; it worked fine with the same laptop in the office.
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com. Introduction In this database design tutorial (~9000 words) I’m going to show how to design the database tables for a real-world project of substantial complexity. We’ll design a clone of Google Calendar. We will model as much as possible of the functionality that is…
The Ivory Tower is a blog about software engineering and development philosophy by Anders Sundman.
I will often say that the so-called “C ABI” is a very bad one, and a relatively unimaginative one when it comes to passing complicated types effectively. A lot of people ask me “ok, what would you use instead”, and I just point them to the Go register ABI , but it seems most people have trouble filling in the gaps of…
Neovim 0.10 was the longest release cycle since the heady days of the 0.5 release. There are a ton of new features in this release (as well as some breaking changes), so be sure to check the full release notes. You can view the release notes directly in Nvim with :h news. The news file includes information on new…
Sometimes, I don’t know why I do things. It’s one of these times. A few months ago, Python 3.13 got its JIT engine, built with a new JIT compiler construction methodology (copy-patch, cf. research paper ). After reading the paper, I was sold and I just had to try it with PostgreSQL. And what a fun ride it’s been so…
A great amount of my writing on this site revolves around complaining about modern user interface design . Some people agree with me, some don't. Most probably don't care at all. That's fine. What I find interesting is that many (but not all!) people who disagree either present extremely specific non-argument nitpicks…
Among a certain tech set, Kubernetes has earned a reputation as an unnecessarily complicated time-sink that startups should avoid. Using Kubernetes with a small team is seen as a sign of over-engineering.
Let's create a Git commit using Git's low-level (plumbing) commands
I got some fancy new speakers last week. They’re powered speakers and they have streaming service integrations built in, unlike the 35-year-old passive speakers I’m upgrading from. Overall they’re great! But they’re so loud that it’s difficult to make small volume adjustments within the range of safe volume levels for…
Was the ssh backdoor the only goal that "Jia Tan" was pursuing with their multi-year operation against xz?
Building on the earlier article on automatically transforming Git URLs, I’m back with another article on a (potentially powerful) feature of Git—the ability to conditionally include Git configuration files. This means you can configure Git to be configured (and behave) differently based on certain conditions, simply…
A friendly introduction to assembly for high-level programmers — Hello
A visual, interactive guide to what bloom filters are, when you would use them, and how they work.
Macros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
FEBRUARY 5, 2016 · FACEBOOK
Writing auto-pilots in JavaScript for MSFS
A deep dive into a new reasoning technique called Entropix.
This article explains how a game can be made in Prolog by leveraging the hidden power of logic programming. Inspired by the elegance of data-driven design and declarative programming paradigms, I will be explaining a new way of designing game rules which can at the same time be used as the source code of the gameplay…
Learn how asyncio works by recreating it from scratch with Python generators and using the __await__ dunder method for the async/await keywords.
Learn to write and modify Zero Knowledge Proofs from scratch. You'll build a digital signature scheme using hash-based commitments, gaining practical ZKP programming skills and intuition along the way. By the end, you'll have all the tools you need to implement things like group signatures.
PostgreSQL isn’t just a simple relational database; it’s a data management framework with the potential to engulf the entire database…
I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…
