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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
I recommend using Python for data analysis, and I recommend Wes McKinney's book Python for Data Analysis. I prefer Python to R for mathematical computing because mathematical computing doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's always other stuff to do. I find doing mathematical programming in a general-purpose language is…
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
Byte-code compilation is an underdocumented — and in the case of the recent lexical binding updates, undocumented — part of Emacs. Most users know that Elisp is usually compiled into a byte-code saved to .elc files, and that byte-code loads and runs faster than uncompiled Elisp. That’s all users really need to know…
Two services running on the same machine. One of them opens a listening TCP socket bound to localhost, the other one connects to that. They exchange data. Every now and then , the service that initiated the connection gets an ECONNRESET while reading data from the socket -- but no other errors show up in the logs, no…
A blog about software.
The C standard library includes a qsort() function for sorting arbitrary buffers given a comparator function. The name comes from its original Unix implementation, “quicker sort,” a variation of the well-known quicksort algorithm. The C standard doesn’t specify an algorithm, except to say that it may be unstable (C99…
Understanding a system or software architecture simply, truly, absolutely, undoubtedly requires an occasional sequence diagram. I left ...
Whenever we look at the zsh manual we wonder why there are no examples or those simply things in (shell) life. The zsh contains many features, but there was no manpage with some examples (like procmailex(5)). That’s why we wrote this manpage.
When GADTs (Generalized Algebraic Data Types) landed in OCaml, I wasn’t particularly happy about it. I assumed that it was the kind of nonsense you get when ...
This article will continue the layout module that we started in Part 5. This time, we’ll add the ability to lay out block boxes. These are boxes that are stack vertically, such as headings and paragraphs.
Hello everyone! Time for a bit of a diversion towards one of my favorite projects, Hy ! (I'm an occasional committer, but the main mastermind behind the project is my good friend Paul Tagliamonte .) For those of you who don't know, Hy is a Lisp that transforms into the Python AST. Even more fun: you can import .hy…
We describe a graph-theoretic analogue of vector calculus. The linear operators of vector calculus (gradient, divergence, laplacian) correspond to the matrices naturally associated to graphs (incidence matrix, adjacency matrix). This analogy is useful for formalizing the discretization of some problems in image and…
Melrōse is both a language and a tool to create and listen to music interactively, The language uses musical primitives (note, sequence, chord) and many functions (map, group, transpose) that can be used to create more complex patterns, loops and tracks. Melrōse uses MIDI output to produce sound by any (hard or…
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
Go templates are a powerful method to customize output however you want, whether you’re creating a web page, sending an e-mail, working with Buffalo, Go-Hugo, or just using some CLI such as kubectl.
Dependently typed programming is becoming all the rage these days.Advocates are talking about all the neat stuff you can do by putting more and more informat...
How we built a 40x faster hash joiner using vectorized execution.
A sparse matrix is a matrix that has a value of 0 for most elements. If the ratio of N umber of N on- Z ero ( NNZ ) elements to the size is less than 0.5, the matrix is sparse. While this is the mathematical definition, I will be using the term sparse for matrices with only NNZ elements and dense for matrices with all…
In this article, I will describe steps needed to start on with development of real UEFI applications on x86 PC, and share some practical experiences with problems doing so. I will focus on 64-bit version of UEFI, because the 32-bit version isn't much used in this area (most likely due to Microsoft decision not to…
The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.6.4.
PostgreSQL always allowed, by default, any user to connect to any database, and create new tables (and views, and so on) in “public" schema. The one that is created by default.
How I investigated and worked around a kernel bug that caused async-profiler to freeze my machine whenever I tried to use a profiler.
Actionable steps on how to improve your Postgres database performance.
ImapGoose is a small program to keep local mailboxes in sync with an IMAP server. The wording “keep […] in sync” implies that it does so continuously, rather than a one-time sync. ImapGoose is designed as a daemon, monitoring both the IMAP server and the local filesystem, and immediately synchronising changes. When…
