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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,420 posts.
Why I’m Remaking OpenAI Universe
OpenAI Universe was very exciting when it first came out. With Universe, it was suddenly possible to train AI to play Flash games, book flights online, and perform various other real-world tasks. Unfortunately, Universe never really took off in the AI world. I don’t know why others aren’t using Universe, but I can…
The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer
Being involved in open source software is rewarding, yeah? You start off contributing to your favorite project, and it feels so heartwarming when that project’s maintainers recognize your effort. Then a few years later you somehow end up responsible for that project, and maybe some satellite projects, and people are…
Hell is a multi-threaded C++ program (2006)
What are threads? Every modern operating system has support for threads, and most programming environments provide some level of support for...
Formal Verification: The Gap Between Perfect Code and Reality
Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations. In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems, taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Z
Understanding the math behind 0x5f3759df and the fast inverse square root (2012)
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.
Fun vs. Computer Science (2016)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Literate SQL
Complex queries are hard to read. Literate SQL is about writing queries that are as easy to read as a good novel.
My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies
‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Relicensing the GraphQL specification
Today we’re relicensing the GraphQL specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) v1.0. We think the OWFa is a great fit for…
Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas and Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
How I Used Deep Learning to Train a Chatbot to Talk Like Me
Can you see the resemblance?
CKEditor 5: New approach to rich text editing on the web
The heart of the new CKEditor Ecosystem is undoubtedly our brand new editor, CKEditor 5.
Understanding Git Filter-Branch and the Git Storage Model
The other day Steve wanted git alchemy done on the Rust repo. Specifically, he wanted the reference and nomicon moved out into their own repositories …
How Do You Know a Developer Is Doing a Good Job?
There are many ways to evaluate a developer. Should we use quantitative metrics or stick to qualitative ones?
Of SVG, Minification and Gzip
Smaller files are downloaded faster, so making an asset file size smaller before sending it to a client is a good thing to do.
A programming language from scratch: 3 steps to an interpreter
A little while ago I wrote about 16bitjs, a 16 bit virtual machine written in javascript. It implemented a custom CPU architecture and assembly language, assembler, and debugger. I had the thought …
Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Data Replication
In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication. We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we…
Open Source .NET three years later
A little over 3 years ago Microsoft announced that they were open sourcing large parts of the .NET framework and as Scott Hanselman said in his Connect 2016 keynote, the community has been contributing in a significant way:
A 1 KB Docker Container
Field notes from a software developer
Extracting Chinese Hard Subs from a Video, Part 1
I’ve been watching the Chinese TV show 他来了,请闭眼 (Love Me If You Dare). It’s a good show, kinda reminiscent of the BBC series Sherlock, likewise a crime drama ...