1081
Strong Eventual Consistency – The Big Idea Behind CRDTs
Missing the Forest for the Sequence Trees.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
1082
A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements
You can use CSS to add some simple functionality to HTML <dialog> elements!
1083
Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity?
The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids each day - not from stone, but from code. Yet despite far more advanced tools, these systems don’t always make the experience better. So why, when KISS (Keep It…
1084
Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat
libexpat is a fast streaming XML parser. Alongside libxml2, Expat is one of the most widely used software libre XML parsers written in C, specifically C99. It is cross-platform and licensed under the MIT license .
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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
OOXML is less an act of sabotage than the continuation of a flawed, inelegant lineage.
1086
The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)
About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world... Plus a `glibc`…
1087
An Interactive Guide to Rate Limiting
Learn about rate limiting algorithms with interactive apps, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Fixed Window, and Sliding Window methods
1088
Implementing Forth in Go and C
I first ran into Forth about 20 years ago when reading a book about designing embedded hardware . The reason I got the book back then was to actually learn more about the HW aspects, so having skimmed the Forth chapter I just registered an "oh, this is neat" mental note and moved on with my life. Over the last two…
1089
From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon
Implementing the famous donut.c animation in actual silicon using CORDIC and ray marching
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JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform
A couple of years ago, we initiated the idea of creating a Kotlin Multiplatform IDE to help facilitate the development of KMP applications. We embarked on this venture, building on the Fleet platform,
1092
A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler
Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler
1093
Yocto, RockPi and SBOMs: Building modern embedded Linux images
TLDR: I wanted to generate an up-to-date disk image for a Rock Pi 4 using Yocto that included CUPS and Docker to both get a better understanding of Yocto …
1094
Patterns for Building Realtime Features
Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date. The features predominantly require sharing changes triggered by one user to other …
1095
The Joy of Nand2Tetris
For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…
1096
Problems with Go channels (2016)
Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…
1097
I tried vibe coding in BASIC and it didn't go well
With the rise of LLM systems (or “AI” as they are annoying called), the term “vibe coding” is all the rage recently. So I wondered, how does vibe coding work with BASIC?
1098
Why is this site built with C
Most of what I have written features in the category of notes-to-self. Mostly on how to do A or B.
1099
Awk Technical Notes (2023)
You’ll learn why AWK doesn’t have a GC and understand some peculiarities in its syntax
1100
A Deep Dive into Solid Queue for Ruby on Rails
In the second part of our series, let's dive deeper into some of Solid Queue's more advanced features.
1101
Hacking Coroutines into C
A while ago, I was part of a team developing embedded software. The software was deeply rooted in state machines - dozens of them—spread across multiple functions. While this architecture is common in embedded development, especially for systems without an operating system, I started to question: Is this really the…
1102
My favourite small hash table
I'm the kind of person who thinks about the design and implementation of hash tables. One design which I find particularly cute, and I think deserves a bit more publicity, is Robin Hood open-addressing with linear probing and power-of-two table size. If you're not familiar with hash table terminology, that might look…
1103
CRDT: Text Buffer
Collaboratively editing strings of text is a common desire in peer-to-peer applications. For example, a note-taking app might represent each document as a single collaboratively-edited string of text.
1104
Several core problems with Rust
I used to call myself a Rust hater, but really I was doing it just to compensate for the perceivable fanboyism e.g. Rust tops on stackoverflow surveys as most-loved language. There are many reasons to hate C++, and I hate C++ too. Lots of people were waiting for a better programming language, but got Rust instead.
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Error handling in Rust
A blog, mostly about programming
1107
Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field
April 30, 2024. I decided to dedicate a week to migrate our main project at work (a multiplayer mobile game server in production for over 4 years) from Scala...
1108
Supercharge SQLite with Ruby Functions
An interesting twist in my recent usage of SQLite was the fact that I noticed my research scripts and the database intertwine more. SQLite is unique in that it really lives in-process, unlike standalone database servers. There is a feature to that which does not get used very frequently, but can be indispensable in…
1109
Writing Speed-of-Light Flash Attention for 5090 in CUDA C++
In this post, I will walk through how I learned to implement Flash Attention for 5090 in CUDA C++. The main objective is to learn writing attention in CUDA C++, since many features are not available in Triton, such as MXFP8 / NVFP4 MMA for sm120. I also feel this is a natural next step after learning about matmul…
1110
Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...