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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.

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16502

Implementing a JIT-compiler with Rust

I am writing Dora, a simple JIT-compiler with Rust. Dora is both the name of the custom programming language and of the JIT-compiler. After some time working on it, I want to write about the experiences I made. I started this project to get a better understanding of the low-level implementation details of a…

16505

Spotify Codes – Part 2

In part 1 I dove into Spotify Codes and explained the general technical concepts of how they work. If you haven’t read that post you should check it out. I shared it on reddit where it generated a lot of interesting discussion. Ludvig Strigeus, a key early developer at Spotify and the person who invented Spotify…

16507

Render Multimedia in Pure C

In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…

16509

Modeling Adversaries with TLA+

A common question I get about specs is how to model bad actors. Usually this is one of two contexts: The spec involves several interacting agents sharing a protocol, but some of the nodes are faulty or malicious: they will intentionally try to subvert the system. The spec involves an agent subject to outside forces…

16520

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…

16523

Rust in 2022

In previous years, the core team have asked the community to write new years blog posts about Rust in the coming year. They haven't this year, but I wanted to write one anyway. However, it turned out to be harder than expected. Perhaps that's due to Rust being in an

16524

A Rant about Front-end Development

I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views…

16526

The Case for Bash (2021)

Bash is oft-maligned: you hear it sneered at in sentences like “our continuous integration pipeline is just a pile of bash scripts .” It is commonly regarded as unintelligible and thus unmaintainable. The pile of bash scripts are the toxic byproduct of an infrastructure team understaffed, pressed for time, unwilling…