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Five Kinds of Nondeterminism
Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
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Writing a Hypervisor in 1k Lines
Writing a Hypervisor in 1,000 Lines
1323
Build your own SQLite, Part 4: reading tables metadata
As we saw in the opening post, SQLite stores metadata about tables in a special "schema table" starting on page 1. We've been reading records from this…
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My five-year experiment with UTC
Transform Your Time Management Forever! Discover how switching to UTC eliminated time zone confusion, boosted productivity, and simplified global scheduling for remote work.
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The bloat of edge-case first libraries
How building edge-case first led to bloated, overly-granular libraries and what we can do about it
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How functional programming shaped and twisted front end development
A friend called me last week. Someone who’d built web applications back for a long time before moving exclusively to backend and infra work. He’d just opened a modern React codebase for the first time in over a decade.
1327
Arenas in Rust
At one level, this question is not very fair, because an answer to it as stated would be that one simply does not use doubly linked lists. They have been popular in introductory computer science lectures because they are a neat way to explain pointers in a data structure that's easy to draw on a whiteboard, but they…
1328
Be careful with Go struct embedding
The gophers nested too greedily and too deep.
1329
Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations
Timeline & Responsible Disclosure
1330
The Polyglot NixOS
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go.
1331
We reverse-engineered Flash Attention 4
Asynchrony, fast approximate exponents, and 10x more efficient softmax.
1332
Archiving Git branches as tags
I have a spicy git alias that allows me to "archive" old git branches by converting them to tags, making them less visible across git tooling. # ~/.gitconfig…
1333
Improving on std:count_if()'s auto-vectorization
To start off, we can leverage the STL for this calculation. std::count_if() more precisely:
1334
Loading Pydantic models from JSON without running out of memory
Pydantic’s JSON loading uses a huge amount of memory; here’s how to reduce it.
1335
Google Logo Ligature Bug
Jeffrey Yasskin recently pointed out an interesting security bug: The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users into thinking they were really interacting with Google. To see how…
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How to make things slower so they go faster
In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align, e.g., after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or as a service returns from an outage, the bucketed arrival rate can
1337
Lemma for the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory
This post illustrates a key lemma that is used in proving the fundamental theorem of Galois theory (FTGT). Note that FTGT is not covered in this post. The focus of this post is on understanding and proving this lemma only. Here is the lemma from the book Galois Theory , 5th ed. by Stewart (2023):
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Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
1339
A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization
I recently went on a nice long SCUBA diving trip with my wife and daughters. Lots of diving implies lots of showers, and lots of showers means lots of shower-thoughts! [1] An especially interesting one I had turned into a nice way to visualize some aspects of the Collatz Conjecture.
1340
From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work
Understanding how search engines transform text into tokens through character filtering, tokenization, stemming, and stopword removal.
1341
Datalog in miniKanren
A browser with Wasm GC and tail call support is required for this demo. We recommend using either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
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Electron vs. Tauri
Electron is the most popular framework for building desktop apps using web technologies. In this article, we'll discuss a newer alternative, Tauri, and weigh some of the pros and cons between the two frameworks.
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Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire
A joyride through the dangers of lock-free programming.
1346
Don't Be Afraid of Types
Types in coding projects are good. Don’t be afraid to create them when you need to.
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Jujutsu and Radicle
Sovereign code infrastructure.
1348
Stability by Design
I think I figured out what’s stressing me out about programming in dynamically typed languages: It’s about always being unsure if using a library in a particular way is going to work and if minor version upgrades aren’t going to break your code.
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Simpler Backoff
Exponential backoff with jitter is de rigeur for making service calls. This code, or something like it, probably looks really familiar: func do(ctx context.Context) error { const ( maxAttempts = 10 baseDelay = 1 * time.Second maxDelay = 60 * time.Second ) delay := baseDelay for attempt := range maxAttempts { err :=…
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Indexing Code at Scale with Glean
We’re sharing details about Glean, Meta’s open source system for collecting, deriving, and working with facts about source code. In this blog post we’ll talk about why a system like Glean is import…