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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,831 posts.

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8551

A proof that Unix utility sed is Turing complete

Many people are surprised to learn that `sed`, a seemingly simple text filtering program, is actually Turing complete. This realization prompts the question: how can a text processing utility achieve such computational power? The answer lies in sed's fundamental operations. Essentially, sed functions as a miniature...

8557

Recursive Common Table Expressions in Postgres

Common Table Expressions in PostgreSQL are a powerful SQL construct. You can think of CTEs as a view that is materialized only while the query is running. Recursive CTEs allow themselves to be called until some condition is met. This post from the Citus Data team explores how recursive CTEs work in Postgres.

8558

Common bugs in writing (2021)

Like almost all rules, there are cases where breaking them is a good idea and seasoned writers may well object with "but" responses for some of these. Thus, consider the rules below as mental rumble strips - you should probably slow down and think if you encounter these cases.

8559

Java Hello World, LLVM Edition

After exploring Java bytecode in previous years (2022, 2023, 2024), this year we’ll take an unexpected detour for a Java advent: instead of generating Java bytecode, we’ll use Java to build and execute LLVM IR, the intermediate language behind compilers like clang. Using Java’s Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API…

8573

Building a Web Game in C

Christmas is coming up. When I used to work at a bank the entire month of December and a bit of January we were placed under “Change Freeze”. We weren’t allowed to deploy updates to our applications during this period. The thinking was: A lot of people are away over Christmas Application changes can lead to crashes…

8576

Modernizing the DOM Tree in Microsoft Edge

The DOM is the foundation of the web platform programming model, and its design and performance impacts the rest of the browser pipeline. However, its history and evolution is far from a simple story. Over the past three years, we’ve embarked on an in-flight refactoring of the DOM in Microsoft Edge, with our eye on