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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,844 posts.
The craft of programming is almost universally concerned with different types of data and operations/algorithms that act on this data [1] . Therefore, it's hardly surprising that designing abstractions for data types and operations has been on the mind of software engineers and programming-language designers since…
Why unsafe Rust is a complex and user unfriendly experience.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Almost every programming language uses 64-bit integers on typical modern Intel machines. OCaml uses a special 63-bit representation. How does it affect OCaml?
How it felt to be computing in the late aughts vs. now.
Memory-mapping a file is convenient, but it's a hazard when used with async/await concurrent code: it means a "simple" memory index does blocking IO.
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
MirrorCode is Epoch AI's benchmark for long-horizon coding: AI can reimplement entire programs end-to-end, with no access to the original source code.
Here's a usability feature for the web: disable double-clicks on links and form submits. Before you think I'm a complete idiot, allow me to talk some sense into …
How (and why!) to convince the machines to write lenses for you
No one has ever written a FactoryFactoryFactory and deployed it to production, right? This article takes a look at some real Java mishaps.
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
Master the art of efficient text navigation and editing in Vim with this comprehensive command workflow tutorial. Explore key commands and practical examples to enhance your productivity in Vim.
An analysis of the results from the 2021 Go Developer Survey.
All you need is a text editor, a makefile and a USB-serial cable.
Someone asked me recently what I thought about XML being removed from the Twitter streaming API. Around the same time, I heard that Foursquare are also moving to a JSON-only API.
A playbook for ethical engineering on the web.
I haven’t been on r/lisp for a week or so due to being rather low on free time as we try and get an alpha of our game out of the door. When I did pop back I saw ‘5 Reasons why Lisp Games Suffer and proposed solution’ which I thought would be interesting, but what I found was bizarre and misinforming.
Three years ago, I downloaded the nascent Scala.js compiler and tried to use it on a toy project.
Thousands of programming languages were invented in the first 50 years of the age of computing. Many of them were similar, and many followed a traditional, evolutionary path from their predecessors. What eventually became APL was first a mathematical notation, not as a computer programming language.
I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…
A crit-bit tree can be used as a high-speed associative array. For example, an array mapping 54 to 1, 19 to 2, 99 to 3, 85 to 4, and 88 to 5 can be stored as a crit-bit tree containing 54=1, 19=2, 99=3, 85=4, and 88=5. The smallest string in the crit-bit tree larger than 85= is 85=4.
A tutorial how to use a monorepo architecture in frontend JavaScript and TypeScript with tools like npm/yarn/pnpm workspaces, Turborepo/NX/Lerna, Git Submodules, ...
“The world’s been divided into people who can make software, and the people who use software all day, and basically we think that that paradigm is not a good one. It feels kind of broken,” says Lane Shackleton, Head of Product at Coda, where they are building a new kind of document that blurs the line between users…
