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Improvements to the Xerox Alto Mandelbrot drop runtime from 1 hour to 9 minutes
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,828 posts.
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What’s in that .wasm? Introducing wasm-decompile
WABT gains a new decompilation tool that can make it easier to read the contents of Wasm modules.
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Looking at your program’s structure in Go 1.7
Go 1.7—out today!—features an new SSA-based compiler backend. SSA is a method of describing low-level operations like loads and stores that roughly map to machine instructions, with the special difference that SSA acts as though it has infinite number...
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The unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzing for porting programs
A simple strategy of having LLMs write fuzz tests and build up a port in topological order seems effective at automating porting from C to Rust.
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Scalable, Resilient Brainfuck
Building Brainf∗ck interpreter for the 21 century, with all the best systems design practices in mind. Think of Brainf∗ck-as-a-service cloud solution!
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Number plate recognition with Tensorflow
Over the past few weeks I’ve been dabbling with deep learning, in particular convolutional neural networks . One standout paper from recent times is Google’s Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View . This paper describes a system for extracting house numbers from street view imagery using a single end-to-end…
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A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
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Implementing a Convolutional Neural Network from Scratch in Python
A simple guide to what CNNs are, how they work, and how to build one from scratch in Python.
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Learning C with gdb
The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City.
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Inheritance was invented as a performance hack
It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula . The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look.
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Why Developers Never Use State Machines
Why developers rarely use state machines, seeing them as overkill until it's too late to switch, and what the state_machine gem did for CrowdHired.
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Unix as IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
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WSL2 can now mount Linux ext4 disks directly
If you're on a version of Windows 11 that is build 22000 or greater, you can ...
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.NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
In this post I discuss the support for union types released in .NET 11, how they're implemented, the choices made, and how to create your own
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Zig's Lovely Syntax
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
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What's New in POSIX 2024
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
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Why Safety Profiles Failed
As for dangling pointers and for ownership, this model detects all possible errors . This means that we can guarantee that a program is free of uses of invalidated pointers.
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Fast Rust Builds
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
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A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
If you don't you're not alone. Right now, as I'm typing this, 4 of the top 4 Google results for "find command linux" contain at least one example of the pattern illustrated by the command above.
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Leaving OCaml
Part of a 3 part series. Followups on F#, Rust I built the first demo of Dark in Python, in about two weeks. A few months later when I started productizing it, I rebuilt it in OCaml. Back in 2017, when I was considering the language and platform to use
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How to Get Fired Using Switch Statements and Statement Expressions
Updated Oct 27, 2016: Fixed sample code comments in coroutine example as per suggestion , edited text to note D's similar behaviour .
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Rewriting TypeScript in Rust?
Donny (kdy1 on GitHub) is rewriting TypeScript in Rust hoping to speed up tsc which is slow due to its TypeScript base.
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When I reject AI code even if it works
AI can make implementation cheap while making review and judgment more expensive.
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I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance
I needed to choose a framework for a mobile-first app at work. I started comparing Next.js, SolidStart, and SvelteKit, then expanded to 10 frameworks. The measurements revealed dramatic differences in bundle sizes, performance, and the real cost of framework choices.
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10000 things all CS students should do before graduating
It’s Commencement time! So I thought I’d compile a list of 1010 10000 things I believe all ICS students should have done (by themselves) by the time they get their diplomas. With luck, students have come across some of these in courses. Most likely, that won’t happen, so students need to make time for extra-curricular…
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The logging framework isn't a bottleneck, and other lies your laptop tells you
Your laptop spends all day lying to you. If you want your code to run well on server hardware, best write it on server hardware.