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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
Earlier this year, tylerni7 showed us a proof of concept for a 32 bit Go exploit using this issue . geohot and I had a wager over who could get the first remote code execution on play.golang.org : he won, but just barely ;-). Props also to ricky for helping to find the underlying cause/writing the patch. Here is a…
Arroyo 0.10 has an entirely new SQL engine built with Apache Arrow and DataFusion. It's much faster, smaller, and easier to run. Read on for why and how we're making this change.
Blaise Pascal once famously ended a letter with an apology : I'm sorry that this was such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write you a short one. Computer science has pretty much the same problem. It's a young field, and young fields are, by their nature, messy. As we race to generate new knowledge, we also…
How to get the most of Rust while keeping your code portable
GPT-5.1 is now available in the API, bringing faster adaptive reasoning, extended prompt caching, improved coding performance, and new apply_patch and shell tools.
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
Xcode is a fantastic development environment for developing Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications. But it has some areas for improvement. In this post, I’ll explore some improvements to how documentation and autocompletion is integrated into the development workflow and how Xcode could provide specialized interfaces for…
You have a file, possibly a huge CSV, and you want to import its content into your database. There are lots of options to do this but how would you decide which one to use. More often than not the question is how much time would the bulk load would take. I found my self doing the same
As a sort-of reverse birthday present I’ve decided to release one of my largest projects, in recent memory. This is the project that I’ve been alluding to for quite some time now :
We are proud to present the first 3 working applications developed with Castle Game Engine for the web! Check them out — just open the links below, in any web browser (Firefox, Chrome…)…
The first and only mention of Gumption Theory in modern writing is found towards the end of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author sets out a plain and uncomplicated approach to attaining and maintaining the state of mind required to repair a motorcycle. It takes about 20 pages. And the…
This tutorial shows how to build the Linux kernel, add a small modification to it and debug the new kernel using Visual Studio with VisualKernel.
I recently read the article Beautiful Branchless Binary Search by Malte Skarupke. In it they discuss the merits of the following snippet of C++ code implementing a binary search :
Last month has been looking like some slow down in my income and traffic. Fortunately it was only temporary as it is getting better with each day now. Anyway I still made quite nice income and as u…
Run sqlite3 dbs in multiple regions with rsync
Smaller programs that do less work.
I used to work as a developer in the “core” group at Opera that developed thePresto web engine. During this period, I often wondered just how many developers...
In the context of web development, "middleware" usually stands for "a part of an application that wraps the original application, adding additional functionality". It's a concept that usually seems to be somewhat underappreciated, but I think middleware is great.
[ This is not mine. I posted it in the interest of personal archival because the oldest mention I could track down on the web appeared on a now-defunct weblog . In the meantime, Mike W. Cremer (who bills himself The Newton™ Scapegoat ☺ ) has claimed credit for coining it after a particularly frustrating DMA debugging…
[ I wrote this post in mid-2014 for debuggers.co, which seems to have gone at least partly defunct, so I am reproducing it here. That site collected answers from programmers to the prompt “What’s the most interesting bug you’ve encountered?” ]
I recently wrote a small 16-bit Forth for 8086 PCs running DOS. I built the basic one-liner loop words that can trivially be built with j...
_posted by John Clements_ Racket version 8.4 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org. Command-line Racket provides a new expression editor by default for its read-eval-print loop (REPL). The new REPL is based on the Chez Scheme expr...
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Some people have a favorite color or a favorite food. It may come as no surprise that I have a favorite compiler bug. Today, I'm going to demonstrate it and pick it apart, a topic suggested by reader Daniel Jalkut.
Why ast.walk when you can ast.sprint? How we made Python AST traversal 220x faster while building a custom linter for Reflex's AI code generation.
Starting with MySQL 5.0.3, the maximum field length for VARCHAR fields was increased from 255 characters to 65,535 characters. This is good news, as VARCHAR fields, as opposed to TEXT fields, are stored in-row for the MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB has different characteristics). TEXT and BLOB fields are not stored…
Someone mentioned cargo-bloat the other day and it reminded me that I have been wanting to measure the code size for generic functions in librsvg, and see if there are improvements to be made.
How we implemented consistent, distributed, incremental backup in CockroachDB.
