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Things Unlearned
One of my favorite questions to ask people is: what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
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s/bash/zsh/g
There is simply no way you can do calculations with fractions in bash without relying on bc , dc , or some hacks. Compared to simply being able to use a + b it’s ugly, slow, and difficult.
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I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)
In defense of one of the most important JavaScript libraries ever
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Seemingly impossible functional programs (2007)
Andrej has invited me to write about certain surprising functional programs. The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “ Cantor space ” of infinite sequences of binary digits. I have included references at the end. A weak form of exhaustive search amounts to checking whether…
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PyTorch 1.10
We are excited to announce the release of PyTorch 1.10. This release is composed of over 3,400 commits since 1.9, made by 426 contributors. We want to sincerely thank our...
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Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major languages in 2021
Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major language implementations in 2021
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Reverse Engineer the BL602 WiFi Driver
What happens inside the WiFi Driver on RISC-V BL602... And how we found the incomplete source code for the driver
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Onboarding to Elixir
I've worked with a number of clients on Elixir projects and I've onboarded myself, I've been onboarded and I've onboarded others. And compared to my experiences with PHP/Python/Javascript and my limited experience with C#/.Net I have experienced quite a difference.
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Manifest v3 Update
Manifest v3 support for Firefox extensions is coming in late 2021. See a high-level summary of changes to the platform.
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A Visual Guide to React Rendering
Contrary to popular belief, by default, react component doesn't care whether its props changed or not. It will always re-render when its parent renders.
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How to Crawl the Web with Scrapy
How to use the python web scraping framework Scrapy to crawl indeed.com. Learn data engineering strategies for getting actionable insights from public information.
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Intro to Deep Learning
I just sat down this morning and organized all deep learning related videos I recorded in 2021. I am sure this will be a useful reference for my future…
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In C, how do you know if the dynamic allocation succeeded?
In the C programming language, we allocate memory dynamically (on the heap) using the malloc function. You pass malloc a size parameter corresponding to the number of bytes you need. The function returns either a pointer to the allocated memory or the NULL pointer if the memory could not be allocated. Or so you may ……
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In software, when an engineer exits the team
My perspective when a team member gives their notice
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Let's write a compiler, part 1: Introduction, selecting a language, and planning
I think we all knew this might be coming once we finished up with our assembler . While we can in theory solve any computable problem by writing the appropriate assembly for our assembler, writing assembly code can be a bit more cumbersome than a high-level language. There is a reason why we did not write our…
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How PostgreSQL aggregation works and how it inspired our hyperfunctions’ design
A discussion of aggregation in PostgreSQL and how it integrates with the design of Timescale’s hyperfunctions.
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My tutorial and take on C++20 coroutines
Over the last 25 years, I’ve written a lot of event-driven code in C++. A typical example of event-driven code is registering a callback that gets invoked every time a socket has data to be read. Once you have read an entire message, possibly after many invocations, you parse the message and invoke another callback…
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Roku releases IDK to allow consumers to develop applications for their Roku
Roku provides the simplest way to stream entertainment to your TV. On your terms. With thousands of available channels to choose from.
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Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing
André Garzia made a nice blog post called “Lua, a misunderstood language” recently, and unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) a bulk of HN comments on it was about the age-old 0-based vs. 1-based indexing debate. You see, Lua uses 1-based indexing, and lots of programmers claimed this is unnatural because “every…
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Power Fx: open-source now available
The preview release of Microsoft Power Fx is now available as open source on GitHub You can now freely integrate this Excel-like, low code programming language in all of your own projects.
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The Human Side of Elixir
In this blog post, we take a look at the Elixir programming language from the engineer/business perspective.