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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
It’s no secret that the Python datetime library has its quirks. Not only are there probably more than you think; third-party libraries don’t address most of them! I created a new library to explore what a better datetime library could look like.
Google and many other organizations, such as NIST, IETF, and NSA, believe that migrating to post-quantum cryptography is important due to the large risk posed by a crypt…
Somehow people are still putting tiny libraries on npm, and it really needs to stop.
I recently worked on two different C projects, and I wanted to structure them in a way that would make them easy to maintain and understand. I also wanted to make sure that the projects were easy to build and test. In this post, I will share my experience and the best practices I found for structuring C projects.
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
About 10 years ago I wrote a post PostgreSQL for the Busy MySQL Developer, as part of switching from MySQL to Postgres for my personal and professional projects wherever I could.
This page summarizes the changes between official stable releases of Go. The change log has the full details.
My day job is in browsers and cryptography , not compilers, yet I often find that I need to spend more of my time working through the semantics of programming languages than using them. This post discusses a thorny cross-language issue between C, C++, and Rust. In short:
Here are some notes that may help newcomers understand what is actually happening with QEMU devices:
How does the Linux kernel represent processes and their state: A breakdown of task_struct and mm_struct
Topiary’s journey to a modern, user-friendly CLI experience.
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
An exploration of numbers in JSON and various JSON implementations
Most of my career has been working on web services and mobile apps but at some point this got old for me—in high school I was part of a soldering club and I had this lingering feeling that I wanted to get into ‘harder’ problems. Two years ago I started looking around for companies in Amsterdam and came across…
Fuzzing—one of the most successful techniques for finding security bugs, consistently featured in articles and industry conferences—has become so popular that you may think most important software has already been extensively fuzzed. But that’s not always the case. In this blog post, we show how we fuzzed the ZBar…
Anthropic released a new feature for their Claude.ai consumer-facing chat bot interface today which they’re calling “the analysis tool”. It’s their answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode: Claude can …
A primer on GPU architecture and computing
As developers, we use databases all the time. But how do they work? In this series, we'll try to answer that question by building our own SQLite-compatible…
Testing against a real database uncovers hidden pitfalls that can appear as the application matures
Update (October 2024): In response to numerous requests from external developers, we have open-sourced a version of our Enzyme to React Testing Library (RTL) conversion tool. You can now find it on npm, along with detailed instructions on how to integrate and use it in your projects. In the world of frontend…
Spaced repetition is complicated in hierarchical bodies of knowledge, like mathematics, because repetitions on advanced topics should trickle down to update the repetition schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced (while being discounted appropriately since these repetitions are often too early to…
We can use the `createWebArchiveData` method on `WKWebView` to write a Swift script that creates Safari webarchive files.
Sampling is one of the most powerful tools you can wield to extract meaning from large datasets. It lets you reduce a massive pile of data into a small yet representative dataset that’s fast and easy to use.
In this series of tutorials, we will delve into creating simple 2D games in Common Lisp. The result of the first part will be a development environment setup and a basic simulation displaying a 2D sce...
A wrap-up of several years of development and the alpha release of Liikennematto.
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely…
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?
