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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.
Base64 is an elegant way to convert binary data to text, making it easy to store and transport. This article covers the basics of Base64 encoding, including what it is, how it works and why it's important. It also shows how to encode and decode Base64 data in various programming languages.
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
Here is a Go function, if_max(). It finds the max value of an array of integers. Simple enough:
A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.
A community and blog for embedded software makers
We talk about programming like it is about writing code, but the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues.
People always talk about "P vs NP" like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification....
LiveView's new Streams feature is set to be a game changer and yet easy to use at the same time. Chris McCord writes this dev blog post shining a light onto this new feature.
oppiliappan's μsings
Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of…
For almost two years now, the vast majority of our backend code was written in Rust (aside from a little bit of Python). I love Rust, it’s by far my favorite language. I find myself missing match in pretty much every other language I go to. However, if I was doing it over, I wouldn’t choose Rust. This advice is…
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…
LangChain has become a tremendously popular toolkit for building a wide range of LLM-powered applications, including chat, Q&A and document search. In this blogpost I re-implement some of the novel LangChain functionality as a learning exercise, looking at the low-level prompts it uses to create these higher level…
tldr; With GPT-3, Supabase, Pinecone, and Klaviyo, I built a semantic embeddings search that saved hundreds of hours of manual work for my girlfriends skincare brand ( Oliver Care ).
The ultimate type-level trickery
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Vim one-liners for fast text edits: count words, format JSON, delete blank lines, sum the numbers in a file, extract IP addresses, and open files in splits.
TLDR: Demo is at , code is at . The Problem When building a website or app using HTML Canvas, it’s often a requirement to support a flood fill. That is, when the user chooses a colour and cli…
To be precise, IEEE-754 floating point subtraction is functionally complete . That means you can construct any binary circuit using nothing but floating point subtraction.
An interactive guide to retrying requests: why naive retries overload a failing service, and how exponential backoff and jitter fix it.
Between 2010 and 2019 I interviewed dozens of Software Engineer candidates at Google. Almost always I asked the same interview question…
Wondering about Rust? We're addressing rumors and providing insight gained from years of early adoption of Rust here at Google.
A complete list of SQLite releases in a single page and a chronology are both also available. A detailed history of every check-in is available at SQLite version control site .
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
A fresh new alternative to the official Nix installation scripts.
