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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,534 posts.

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2941

CVE Stuffing

I monitor the @CVENew Twitter feed to keep up with any interesting new vulnerabilities that are released. On December 11th CVE-2020-29589 was published claiming that “the kapacitor Docker ima…

2945

All Hail Geometric Algebra

Rotate a cube by 90 degrees around the \(x\)-axis, then rotate it by 90 degrees around the \(z\)-axis. This is equivalent to a single rotation. What is the axis and angle of this single rotation?

2948

I wrote a new JIT compiler for PostgreSQL

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…

2953

Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

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…

2956

Things I wish Git had: Commit groups

Everyone 1 and their dog 2 loves Git. I know I do. It works, it’s efficient, it has a brilliant data model, and it sports every feature under the sun . In 13 years of using it, I’ve never found myself needing a feature it didn’t have. Until recently.

2963

Learning Parser Combinators with Rust

This article teaches the fundamentals of parser combinators to people who are already Rust programmers. It assumes no other knowledge, and will explain everything that isn't directly related to Rust, as well as a few of the more unexpected aspects of using Rust for this purpose. It will not teach you Rust if you don't…

2964

Io uring

Introduced in 2019 (kernel 5.1) by Jens Axboe, io_uring (henceforth uring) is a system for providing the kernel with a schedule of system calls, and receiving the results as they're generated. Whereas epoll and kqueue support multiplexing, where you're told when you can usefully perform a system call using some set of…

2965

Diff Algorithms

How I overcame copying and modifying my own diff library from project to project by diving too deep into diff algorithms and coming out at the other end with new diff library in my hand.

2970

Beyond Light Table

I have three big announcements to make today. The first is the official announcement of our next project. We’ve been quietly talking about it over the past few months, but today we want to tell you a bit more about it and finally reveal its name: