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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
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Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
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Should you ditch Spark for DuckDB or Polars?
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is…
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Every Way to Get Structured Output from LLMs
A survey of every framework for extracting structured output from LLMs, and how they compare.
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PyPy has moved to Git, GitHub
PyPy has moved its canonical repo and issue tracker from https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/pypy to https://github.com/pypy/pypy. Obviously, this means development will now be tracked in Git rather than M
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Let's talk about joins
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
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A railroad simulation using discrete event simulation
In our previous post, we introduced how to utilize Discrete Event Simulation (DES) in PicoLisp. Now, let's explore another application: a railroad model…
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PyTorch Native Architecture Optimization: Torchao
We’re happy to officially launch torchao, a PyTorch native library that makes models faster and smaller by leveraging low bit dtypes, quantization and sparsity. torchao is an accessible toolkit of techniques written...
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Vulkan Foliage rendering using GPU Instancing
Abdelhadi' blog
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Droste’s Lair
A swords-and-sorcery programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures
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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages
I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript…
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Clever code is probably the worst code you could write (2023)
And clear, readable code is probably the hardest code to write
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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The problem with OpenTelemetry
I regularly complain about OpenTelemetry, so with an aim to be a less useless contributor, today I'm putting pen to paper. If you're an implementer, I ask you to read this and take away the personal bias you might have towards your work, and instead look objectively at the feedback being given.
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Dennis Ritchie on the priorities of && || vs. == etc. (1982)
Early C had no separate operators for & and && or | and || . (Got that?) Instead it used the notion (inherited from B and BCPL ) of "truth-value context": where a Boolean value was expected, after "if" and "while" and so forth, the & and | operators were interpreted as && and || are now; in ordinary expressions, the…
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
Articles and programs by Elias Naur
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UI = f(statesⁿ)
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
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Storing Times for Human Events
I’ve worked on various event websites in the past, and one of the unintuitively difficult problems that inevitably comes up is the best way to store the time that an …
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Curl removes experimental HTTP back end in Rust
The ride is coming to an end. The experiment is done. We tried, but we admit defeat. Four years ago we started adding support for an alternative HTTP backend in curl. It would use a library written in rust, called hyper. The idea was to introduce an alternative implementation of HTTP internals that you could ……
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Bit-twiddling optimizations in Zed's Rope
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio walk through the performance optimizations Antonio when working on Zed's Rope data structure before they then pair on adding more optimizations
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A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes
Key concepts & much deserved YAML ranting
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We switched from Next.js to Astro (and why it might interest you)
Follow the first article of a series in which we'll try to summarize our journey with Astro, sharing many cool little tricks and details we found out (or totally came up with) in the process.
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Power of small optimizations
In this post, I will talk about the importance of small optimizations that can provide a lot of performance improvements.
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Notes on the Crystal Language
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Command Line Tools I Like (2022)
The personal site of R. W. Blickhan
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