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Building a roam-like, networked, heavily-customized realtime editor, part 1
I can build this. — every developer at least once
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,508 posts.
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Compiling a Lisp to x86-64: primitive functions
Compiling Lisp primitive unary functions to x86-64
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Alar: The making of an open-source dictionary
The story of a massive Kannada dictionary created by V. Krishna single handedly over four decades, and its accidental discovery and open sourcing at an unlikely place, a stock brokerage.
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Explaining RNNs without neural networks
This article explains how recurrent neural networks (RNN's) work without using the neural network metaphor. It uses a visually-focused data-transformation perspective to show how RNNs encode variable-length input vectors as fixed-length embeddings. Included are PyTorch implementation notebooks that use just linear…
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Creating a Slack app that uses fewer resources
I recently created a macOS app called Slack Lite, which beats Slack's desktop app across a few performance metrics. Slack Lite uses Slack's official UI, so it's visually indistinguishable from the official client. Even so, Slack Lite uses 5x fewer threads, 3.5x less time to startup, and significantly less CPU. In the…
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Finding Goroutine Bugs with TLA+
My job these days is teaching TLA+ and formal methods: specifying designs to find bugs in them. But just knowing the syntax isn’t enough to write specs, and it helps to have examples to draw from. I recently read Chris Siebenmann’s Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy and thought it would make a good case study…
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Fast high-level programming languages
Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…
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Classes are a way of writing higher order functions
Joe and I recently kicked off a re-read of SICP . I can say that it is the most interesting textbook I have gone through. Imagine, you begin with just 4 or 5 constructs, and you end up building algebraic equation solvers, circuit simulators, and even logic programming languages. Because you start off with such few…
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Programming a space invader in OCaml and OpenGL: lessons learned
After a first experience with ReasonML, I wanted to check if its parent language, OCaml, was also that good. It took me an entire game to form a clear opinion.
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Conventions for Command Line Options
This article was discussed on Hacker News and critiqued on Wandering Thoughts ( 2 , 3 ).
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Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync
I am a big fan of my Kindle. This is the device I’d bring over to a desert island. I am also a fairly frequent user of the highlight feature where you can select a bit of text you like and save it. One thing is bothering me though: the lack of open API on the Kindle to retrieve the data about me. Amazon provides the…
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Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus at Zerodha
How we developed a hybrid multi-DC and cloud monitoring stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and Victoria metrics for monitoring system, app and service, and also business metrics.
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Create No-JavaScript friendly sites
Create usable sites, even if JavaScript is blocked
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Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
Teaching our five year old daughter to code by cheating.
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Advanced usage of Python requests: timeouts, retries, hooks
Learn about the advanced features the requests library hides under the hood. DRY base URLs, hooks, retry on failure, default timeouts and mocking.
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Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon
Electron 11.0.0 has been released! It includes upgrades to Chromium 87, V8 8.7, and Node.js 12.18.3. We've added support for Apple silicon, and general improvements. Read below for more details!
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How we designed Dropbox’s ATF – an async task framework
I joined Dropbox not long after graduating with a Master’s degree in computer science. Aside from an internship, this was my first big-league engineering job. My team had already begun designing a critical internal service that most of our software would use: It would handle asynchronous computing requests behind the…
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The C++ Lifetime Profile: How It Plans to Make C++ Code Safer
This blog post explains what the C++ Lifetime Profile is and how it intends to make the language safer and help avoid memory management problems.
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Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
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Lessons in Managing Haskell Memory
At Channable, we process several billion product data records for our customers every day according to user-customizable rules. Internally, this work is subdivided into jobs, where one job takes a set of products and the rules for how to process them as input, and returns the transformed set of products as output…
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I don’t have time for coding challenges
It tends to be standard recruitment practice in the tech industry to require candidates to complete some sort of coding test or challenge. Sometimes this takes the form of the much-feared whiteboard interview – where candidates are expected to work through a problem on the aforementioned whiteboard, in front of an…