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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,810 posts.
Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers
I remember the first time I interviewed for a front-end programming position and got asked how to do something in JavaScript on a white board. The specifics are vague, but it’s crystal clear how stupid it made me feel and how little it had to do with the actual job. Since then I’ve r…
Ruby 3.3
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.3.0. Ruby 3.3 adds a new parser named Prism, uses Lrama as a parser generator, adds a new pure-Ruby JIT comp...
Rust running on every GPU
I've built a demo of a single
Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: Touchpad Gestures Now Shipping
Bill is driven by the challenge of how best to quantify valuable questions that defy quantification. It's possible this instinct may have been awakened in Bill at age 14, when he won a soft, stuffed bunny at the orthodontist for guessing the number of jelly beans in the gumball machine.
Native JSON Output from GPT-4
When integrating LLMs in your products, you often want to generate structured data, like JSONs. With the help of function calling (released June 13th 2023), this process has become much simpler! In this post I will explore the new API. Thanks for reading Simon’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and…
FizzleFade
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler
[Thanks for many comments and votes on Hacker News! ] It’s been two years since I started working as a software engineer. I sometimes tell my colleagues about a student project I did in my junior year of university, and it’s so well-received that I’m writing this post. 1 Now, let me ask you a question. Have you ever…
Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work
This is old! When I wrote it, I was a very different person.As it turns out, growing up a bit made me care a lot less about the nuances of Rust programming.
Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector
Fil-C uses a parallel concurrent on-the-fly grey-stack Dijkstra accurate non-moving garbage collector called FUGC (Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector). You can find the source code for the collector itself in fugc.c , though be warned, that code cannot possibly work without lots of support logic in the rest of the…
A Vim Guide for Advanced Users
We continue our walk on the path leading to Vim mastery by reviewing crazy Vim functionalities which will increase even more your productivity.
How to write blog posts that developers read
Software bloggers can make the same mistakes for years that prevent readers from discovering their writing. I know because I'm one of them. Over time, I've learned techniques that help some blog posts succeed and the pitfalls that cause others to languish in obscurity.
XOR
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
Postgres Full-Text Search: A search engine in a database
With Postgres, you don't need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution. If you haven't yet given Postgres' built-in full-text search a try, read on for a simple intro.
.gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git
You can ignore files in .gitignore, .git/info/exclude, and ~/.config/git/ignore
DRY is an over-rated programming principle?
I figured I'd kick off my new blog with the most click baity thing I could think of. I suspect any developer reading this is aware of the DRY principle becau...
A dumb reason computer vision apps aren’t working: Exif Orientation
I’ve written about lots of computer vision and machine learning projects like object recognition systems and face recognition projects. I…
Fixing for loops in Go 1.22
Go 1.21 shipped a preview of a change in Go 1.22 to make for loops less error-prone.
What Is Nix?
This article is going to be a crash course in what Nix is, how to think about it, and why it's such a valuable and paradigm-shifting piece of technology.
Tricks I wish I knew when I learned TypeScript
TypeScript is a big Superset of JavaScript which has many features which might not be shown in every beginner tutorial. This post has three of them to make your life easier learning TypeScript.
Hexing the technical interview (2017)
Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:
Bad Apple but it's 6,500 regexes that I search for in Vim
There's no reason I should exit vim just to watch a video
Programming is hard
Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and…