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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
A few weeks ago CSS variables—more accurately known as CSS Custom Properties—shipped in Chrome Canary behind the Experimental Web Platform Features flag.[1] When Chrome engineer Addy Osmani first tweeted about the release, he was met with a surprising amount of negativity, hostility, and skepticism. At least, it was…
How we built our first iteration of content matching at Canva.
We build complex mathematical formulas bottom-up using pure lambda calculus. Includes instructions of how to translate Taylor series and other approximations to lambda terms.
A radically different web server architecture that turned my twenty years of experience in building websites upside down
After a long wait, the Progress Report is back! This time it wasn't so much from a lack of content, but from a lack of content creators. The past three months had illnesses hit one of our writers and the other had a very challenging move. Even with these major hurdles jumped, we're not even close to 100% yet. It's…
I love Doom. Or, well, I love Doom 2, which is the game we actually had when I was nostalgia years old. I love the aesthetic — pixely in a 3D(ish) environment, and consistent in a way that meshes together really well. The classic levels are abstract (occasionally too abstract), but still detailed enough to feel like…
Announcement We have noticed a performance regression, a debug flag was left on by mistake. So if you really want the goodness of RC4 without this regression use this build, we'll have...
Almost immediately after we bought our house I received a letter in the mail. The local school district was appealing the tax assessment of my house. The issue in question was the value of my property in 2002 (don’t ask, it’s a long story, and a silly law). My property tax is some percentage of the 2002 value of my…
An exploration of NFL play-by-play statistics with Bokeh and Pandas.
Year’s end is coming closer. Time to clean up repositories and polishing up the toolset. All the well-known tools have been installed already–is there anything else to add to the toolbox?
This week's post will cover a command line tool that helps you play the video game Stardew Valley .
This is one post in a series about programming models and languages for distributed computing that I’m writing as part of my history of distributed programming techniques.Relevant ReadingTrill: A h...
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
It's been a very hectic two months. Dolphin's development builds officially dropped support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 in 5.0-16393 when the Windows buildbots were updated to use Qt6. If you read the last Progress Report, you'd know that Windows 7 was already on shaky terms due…
TL;DR: Don’t base your FPS calculations on a specific number of frames. Instead, maintain a rolling window of frames that happened during the last second. Use precise timers. Read on for more details.
tl;dr: With the Netpbm file formats, it’s trivial to output pixels using nothing but text based IO
I’ve been working on speeding up AVX-512 vertex decoding in meshoptimizer recently; in the process I stumbled upon two optimizations that I did not end up using but I thought they might be fun to write about! The optimizations that actually made it in require some higher level background / explanations that will have…
This post goes through how to maximize file IO performance on linux using zig with io_uring.
If you read a description of a static analysis in a paper, what might you find? There’ll be some cute model of a language. Maybe some inference rules describing the analysis itself, but those rules probably rely on a variety of helper functions. These days, the analysis likely involves some logical reasoning: about…
This post started out as a long-form response to this tweet by Raj Kunkolienkar:
There has been a lot of discussion lately about Rust’s allocator story, and in particular our relationship to jemalloc. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I wanted to try and summarize my understanding and explain for others what is going on. I am trying to be as factually precise in this post as possible. If you see a…
Take a sneak peek at some of the new workflows coming to the Alfred v2 Powerpack soon.
