901
Maybe Everything Is a Coroutine
I was inspired, after reading the excellent blog post Let Futures Be Futures, by the author’s thought experiment of a language in which all functions are coroutines and this is used to express asynchr…
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
902
LaTeX and Neovim for technical note-taking
This is a tutorial series to help you set up the Vim or Neovim text editors for efficiently writing math in LaTeX. Here is an example of what I have in mind:
903
Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)
Previous update: An explanation of 3d projection mathematics (under Road Basics) and analysis of Activision's Enduro (under Case Studies)! Thanks to everyone for all the e-mail! Keep it coming :) Sorry, I can't answer questions about when I'll post source code, but I'm always happy to answer anything else about these…
904
How Antithesis finds bugs
Can solving Super Mario Bros. help solve your distributed systems issues?
905
Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
906
Types as Interfaces
For the past few days, I have been toying with an idea for a board game. To test it out, I wanted to write a simple implementation of it. Here’s an example of a type we might need in a critical phase of the game.
907
Client libraries are better when they have no API?
fsspec is secretly everywhere, and boss
908
Hacking on PostgreSQL is hard
Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might poin...
909
Software possession for personal use
A little rest area by the road to a better web.
910
Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics
Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting at the theory of consensus numbers and moving onto atomic operations and then synchronization primitives and lock-free data structures, all from first principles. With…
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A Note on Essential Complexity
The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?
914
Demystifying the regular expression that checks if a number is prime (2016)
Ever wondered how the ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$ regular expression can tell you if a number is not prime? In this blog post you'll learn how and why it works. Code examples in Java, JavaScript, Python and Perl are provided.
915
How we made Jupyter notebooks load faster
When we received feedback our Notebooks UI was taking too long too load, our engineers dove into ways to improve the developer experience — bringing some load times from 30 seconds down to less than one.
916
Improving Xwayland window resizing
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example
917
How types make hard problems easy
A deep dive into how I use types to the fullest
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Approximating sum types in Python with Pydantic
TL;DR: You can use Pydantic’s support for tagged unions to approximate sum types in Python; go right to Sum types in Python (and onwards) to see how it’s done.
920
SST: Container Support
SST now natively supports building containerized applications.
921
Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
922
Asynchronous IO: the next billion-dollar mistake?
Asynchronous IO (also known as "non-blocking IO") is a technique applications use to allow performing of many IO operations without blocking the calling OS thread, and without needing to spawn many threads (i.e. one thread per operation). In the late 1990s/early 2000s, an increasing amount of people using the internet…
923
Should We Chat, Too? Security Analysis of WeChat's Mmtls Encryption Protocol
This report performs the first public analysis of MMTLS, the main network protocol used by WeChat, an app with over one billion users. The report finds that MMTLS is a modified version of TLS, however some of the modifications have introduced cryptographic weaknesses.
924
When "letting it crash" is not enough
This essay explores the connection between Erlang's process supervision, state management and durable execution.
925
Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32
I teased at this a bit in my previous posts and finally have a setup I’m happy with, so I thought I’d do a more in-depth writeup.
926
JEP 467: Markdown Documentation Comments
Enable JavaDoc documentation comments to be written in Markdown rather than solely in a mixture of HTML and JavaDoc @ -tags.
927
Modernizing the AntennaPod Code Structure
How we spent the last 3 years restructuring the AntennaPod code base.
928
Pg_parquet: An extension to connect Postgres and parquet
Crunchy Data is excited to release a new extension so you can write Postgres data to Parquet and or pull data from Parquet to Postgres. Craig has the details and sample code.
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A simple way to scale pixel art games
Previously in How to present MS-DOS screenshots , I encouraged readers to take the original pixel aspect ratio into account when showing pictures of old games. There’s also a subtler issue to consider: the blur analog display systems had.