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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.

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18033

We can do better than line-buffered output

Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…

18039

Visualizing dynamic programming

I’ve always thought dynamic programming was a pretty crummy name for the practice of storing sub-calculations to be used later. Why not call it table-filling algorithms , because indeed, thinking of a dynamic programming algorithm as one that fills in a table is a quite good way of thinking about it.

18040

Revisiting 'Monadic Parsing in Haskell'

‘Monadic Parsing in Haskell’ is a short paper that laid the groundwork for libraries like Parsec and Attoparsec. Although it was published in 1998 (almost 20 years ago!) it has aged gracefully and the code samples will run with almost no changes. However, the state of the art has advanced since then and I think the…

18044

Links 2013

I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box. But I can show you some of the pieces that snapped into place this year, and try to share a context for why they mattered so much to me.

18046

Matrix Core Programming on AMD GPUs

In this blog post, we walk through how to use Matrix Cores in HIP kernels, with a focus on low-precision data types such as FP16, FP8, and FP4, as well as the new family of Matrix Core instructions with exponent block scaling introduced in the AMD CDNA™4 architecture. Through code examples and illustrations, we…

18049

X is justifiably slow (2022)

I regularly hear or read statements like this: “X is slow but this is to be expected because it needs to do a lot of work”. It can be said about an application or a component in a larger system, and can refer to other resources that aren’t time. I often find these profoundly unhelpful as they depend much more on the…

18059

You say “cave dweller debugging”, I say debug logging

There are still many situations where it's not feasible to stop a process, attach the debugger, and start futzing with memory. We can argue over whether this is because the industry didn't learn enough from the Pharo folks later. For now, let's pretend that's axiomatic: a certain amount of debugging (and even testing)…