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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
Unfortunately, like most aspects of the tax system, this steadily increases in complexity, and this year with the Canada Pension Plan including not just "base" premiums and "additional" premiums but also "second additional premiums", I needed to rewrite my spreadsheet from scratch; and also very unfortunately, the…
Insights | Vincit
We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. Using some new changes to the git client it went from 178GB to 5GB.
The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…
Here’s a fact: GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying. (There’s also an 85 tokens charge for a low-res ‘master thumbnail’ of each picture and higher…
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
Great news for Linux users, after months of testing, Mozilla released today a new package for Firefox on Linux (specifically on Ubuntu, Debian, and any Deb
This post translates a Python program to a recurrent neural network. It visualizes the network and explains each step of the translation in detail.
Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep - Android team, and Alex Rebert - Security Foundations Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a pervasive threa...
An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024. A …
If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.
This is a story about the messy state of Microsoft’s DirectX shader compiler, and trying to wrangle it into a nicer experience for game developers. In some respects, building the DXC compiler better than how Microsoft does.
It has been three days. The room is cold and dark, but your screens are blinding. You feel disoriented as you come in and out of dissociative episodes. Now and again, you laugh, to no accompaniment. Why are you here? Was this your fault?
This summer, I embarked on a side project to create a brand-new Palm OS game, and after less than two months of intermittent coding, I'm excited to announce that it's ready to be released to the public!
At work, we really like the basic simple idea of Htmx. Based on using Htmx in a non-trivial user interface, across a team, we’ve found that the following cases are actually not simple and are quite complicated.
NumPy 2.0.0 is the first major release since 2006. It is the result of 11 months of development since the last feature release and is the work of 212 contributors spread over 1078 pull requests. It contains a large number of exciting new features as well as changes to both the Python and C APIs.
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
Introduction The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so lit...
Lead programmer talks Lua’s flexibility, challenges, and integration with Defold game engine after 60k lines of code in Craftomation 101.
In a previous article I've done the 'Hello, world!' of GUIs in assembly: A black window with a white text, using X11 without any libraries, just talking directly over a socket.
Last week I was helping a friend of mine to get one of his new apps off the ground. I can’t speak much about it at the moment, other than like most apps nowadays it has some AI sprinkled over it. Ok, maybe a bit maybe more just a bit – depends on the way you look at it, I suppose. There is a Retrieval-augmented…
For the last four months I’ve been developing a custom container image builder, collaborating with Outerbounds1. The technical details of the builder itself might be the topic of a future article, but there’s something surprising I wanted to share already: you can use S3 as a container registry! You heard it right…
A comprehensive comparison between Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL for search workloads.
I built a magical meme search engine using siglip/CLIP and vector encoding images. It was a fun way to learn about this powerful technology. I'm sharing the …
