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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.
Grayscale on 1-bit LCDs (2022)
Note: this post is also available in video format on YouTube . Some demo/ difference would be more obvious in video.
JSONB has landed
JSONB is a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that, depending on usage patterns, could be several times faster than the original JSON functions. This enhancement has now landed on trunk .
Push ifs up and fors down
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
A video game where you are an operating system
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be an OS?
Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.…
A non-mathematical introduction to Kalman filters for programmers
Read my manifesto on Code as an alternative to Mathematics. Code for this article can be found on this Colab Notebook should you choose to follow along. Why Kalman Filters? Kalman filters are ingenius. If you have never heard of them, then a very intuitive (and arguably reductive) way to think about them is to
Python 3.12
The official home of the Python Programming Language
Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
How to store your app's entire state in the url
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…
Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder
A version of Flappy Bird that runs entirely inside MacOS Finder. It runs at 4 frames a second! That's a lot of frames!!
Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
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.
Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
Postgres as a graph database
You don't need Neo4j for graph data. Walking through nodes, edges, and recursive traversals in plain Postgres, with working SQL.
Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
Sequence diagrams really shine when you’re documenting different parts of a system and the various ways these parts interact with each other.
iMessage, explained
This blog post is going to be a cursory overview of the internals iMessage, as I’ve discovered during my work on pypush, an open source project that reimplements iMessage.
TypeScript 5.0
Today we're excited to announce the release of TypeScript 5.0! This release brings many new features, while aiming to make TypeScript smaller, simpler,
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...
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…
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.
JavaScript Gom Jabbar
What's inside that package.json? Pain.
You are never taught how to build quality software
Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?
“Exit traps” can make your Bash scripts more robust and reliable (2013)
There is a simple, useful idiom to make your bash scripts more robust - ensuring they always perform necessary cleanup operations, even when something unexpected goes wrong. The secret sauce is a pseudo-signal provided by bash, called EXIT, that you can trap ; commands or functions trapped on it will execute when the…
How does Shazam work? (2022)
Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, I'll show you how one of the most popular apps, Shazam , does it. The founders of Shazam released a paper in 2003 documenting how it works, and I have been working on an implementation of that paper, abracadabra .