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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,817 posts.
You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it. Even though it is used by a…
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
After 2 years of learning German I’ve noticed that, for the most part, you can go a long way by mapping foreign concepts to ones that you already know. In particular, I’ve had success mapping aspects of German grammar to programming concepts I use every day. After all, programmers deal with weird grammars all the…
This is a response to the Rust call for blogs 2021 and also a followup to last year’s entry. It will be entirely focused on GUI.
Java 11 features a new Garbage Collector, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC), which is designed for very low pause times on huge multi-terabyte heaps. In this article we'll cover the motivation for a new GC, a technical overview and some of the really exciting possibilities ZGC opens up.
We’ve created an improved version of OpenAI Codex, our AI system that translates natural language to code, and we are releasing it through our API in private beta starting today.
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
Cloud infrastructure for teams that develop, train, and serve AI applications at scale.
List of 30 interesting commands and tips for the Linux shell that I have collected over the years.
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI) are collaborating to help protect you from leaked PyPI API tokens. From today, GitHub will scan every commit to a public repository for…
Introduction Last week, we talked about using a new Apple M1 based Macintosh as a development workstation and how installing Apple’s development system XCode also installed a large number of open s…
One of the most useful features of any version control system is the ability to "undo" your mistakes. In Git, "undo" can mean many slightly different things.
If this isn’t your first time visiting my blog, you may recall that I’ve spent the past several years building an elaborate microcontroller graphics demo using C++.
.NET 6 is now included in Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) and can be installed with just `apt install dotnet6`.
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
It appears that most of the old iOS conceptual documents have been moved to the documentation archive and are now unsupported.
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…
it's not working
Signal released end-to-end encrypted group calls a year ago, and since then we’ve scaled from support for 5 participants all the way to 40. There is no off the shelf software that would allow us to support calls of that size while ensuring that all communication is end-to-end encrypted, so we bui...
Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version of the information manager from hell (that's actually the tagline for Git, look it up ), he had a very specific use case in mind: his own. He wanted to replace BitKeeper, the distributed version control system that was…
An Exploration of Drawing as Programming Language, Featuring Ideas from Lambda Calculus
We’re excited to announce that the Node.js runtime on Google App Engine is going beta. Node.js makes it easy for developers to build performant web applications and mobile backends with JavaScript. App Engine provides an easy to use platform for developers to build, deploy, manage and automatically scale services on…
Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Built on WireGuard®️, Tailscale enables you to make finely configurable connections, secured end-to-end according to zero trust principles, between any resources on any infrastructure.
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.
