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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
Finding the median in a list seems like a trivial problem, but doing so in linear time turns out to be tricky. In this post I’m going to walk through one of my favorite algorithms, the median-of-medians approach to find the median of a list in deterministic linear time. Although proving that this algorithm runs in…
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
Isometric games are extremely popular. Let's learn the theory behind isometric projection and how it is used by gamedevs to write isometric-looking games.
Valve has shown to occasionally not act on community feedback and bug reports. A story about a decade old bug.
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks, opens all kinds of doors to career opportunities, and allows you to enter those doors earlier in life (which in turn allows you to accomplish more over the course of your career).
Several weeks ago we received a bug report from a customer that said their game was crashing when using IL2CPP scripting backend. QA verified the bug and assigned it to me for fixing. The project was quite big (although far from the largest ones); it took 40 minutes to build on my machine. The instructions on the bug…
Today I noticed via a tweet by @mitsuhiko that Mermaid Gantt diagrams are great for displaying distributed trace information like what you’d get from JaegerU...
The Rust programming language feels like a first generation product. You know what I mean. Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way. They made an entire operating system around multitouch. A smart phone with no keyboard. And a working web browser. Within a few months, we
How we built an anonymous Zig/C++ crash reporter that doesn't require debug symbols to be shipped with the application.
No magic numbers, no tricky tuning: a clean and flexible approach to designing a smooth high-quality reverb, using a variation on the classic feedback-delay network (FDN) structure.
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
Zarar Siddiqi: engineering leader and consultant in Toronto. Building products with care, and helping teams do the same with AI in the loop.
Bringing the great successes of financial engineering to Rust.
A Hubris Bug Story
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
I recently learned an interesting fact about Fibonacci numbers while watching a random number theory video on YouTube. Fibonacci numbers can be used to approximately convert from miles to kilometers and back. Here is how. Take two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, for example 5 and 8. And you're done converting. No...
I'm a Technical Artist with over a decade of professional experience in both AAA and independent projects.
Hello size coding fans. Today, I have something amazing to share: A tiny raycasting engine and city generator that fits in a standalone 256 byte html file. In this post I will share all the secrets…
Can we build a reactive notebook in a single HTML file? Yes (by standing on the shoulders of Observable)
Using the Overpass API to read OSM data, parsing the data with Rust, and then drawing the map onto HTML5 canvas.
Learn how we approached migrating our Wafris v1 client based on Redis to a new faster, easier to use SQLite architecture.
Playing around with the Representation Engineering paper, I made some interesting control vectors, and a Python package to make your own.
Dive deep into the open-source architecture of Lichess.org to understand the technical processes behind making a move in a game.
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
Meta's TestGen-LLM is a sneak peek to the future of developer productivity: specialized, orchestrated, and rigorously filtered.
We continue our work on formal verification of Rust programs with our tool coq-of-rust, to translate Rust code to the formal proof system Coq. One of the limitation we had was the handling of primitive constructs from the standard library of Rust, like Option::unwrapordefault or all other primitive functions. For each…
A guide on how to generate sudokus of any difficulty.
a kind reader reached out about all of my iphone alarms and asked how specifically did I run OCR on my mac. I’m not one to gatekeep, so here’s how you can get yourself a nice local ocr ‘service’ that works in the terminal/CLI/python and costs 0 dollars:
