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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,810 posts.
I think the Rust language is a big success. When I think back on it I am in awe: so much had to go right to get where we are, and there were so many opportunities to go wrong. It took many tiny miracles for the Rust language to become what it has. Those miracles didn’t happen by accident though: each one was created…
I'm working on a flowchart editor that runs in the browser, and I wanted a way for people to use it without having to sign in, or store any data on our server. I wanted to give them control over their data and to be able to store it locally to open and edit later. And also easily share it with other people. It's easy…
How to use uv and the Python inline script metadata proposal PEP 723 to run scripts seamlessly.
Have you ever accidentally caused harm to yourself or others from your code? I have.
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
It’s finally here
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
A version of Flappy Bird that runs entirely inside MacOS Finder. It runs at 4 frames a second! That's a lot of frames!!
You can process data that doesn’t fit in memory by using four basic techniques: spending money, compression, chunking, and indexing.
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
Why GitLab went with Vue.js
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
A short description and screenshot of some useful command line tools I use that aren't part of typical POSIX environment.
For any developer with limited resources, this means a library (where viable) can provide the same functionality to the user, at a lower cost to the developer than a service.
The network stack does several seemingly-impossible things. It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups. It adapts smoothly to network congestion. It provides addressing to billions of active nodes. It routes packets around damaged network infrastructure…
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.
Recently, I came across a few old and new interviews of Donald Knuth (sources: (i) Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth , (ii) Interviews conducted by Lex Fridman Part 1 and Part 2 ), where he sheds light on his work habits, how he approaches problems, and his philosophy towards happiness. I really enjoyed reading…
In this post I explain how I built a search engine from scratch using python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs I follow.
The landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover last month amazed the world. The stunning footage of the descent shows each stage of the sequence. If you have not seen it already you can watch it here .
Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds.
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
We are pleased to announce CoffeeScript 2! This new release of the CoffeeScript language and compiler aims to bring CoffeeScript into the modern JavaScript era, closing gaps in compatibility with JavaScript while preserving the clean syntax that is CoffeeScript’s hallmark. In a nutshell:
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
GotaTun is a WireGuard® implementation written in Rust aimed at being fast, efficient and reliable.
While discussing with fellow developers, I was asked the following question a few times: We spend most of our time as developers thinking, not editing code; so, why invest time into mastering a complicated code editor, and why lose some cognitive resources on thinking about text editing instead of about the real…
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
