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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,817 posts.

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2916

You can beat the binary search

We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values one by one, until we encounter the value, or exhaust the … Continue reading…

2917

Deploys at Slack

Deploys require a careful balance of speed and reliability. At Slack, we value quick iteration, fast feedback loops, and responsiveness to customer feedback. We also have hundreds of engineers who are trying to be as productive as possible. Keeping to these values while growing as a company means continual refinement…

2920

Can Bundler be as fast as uv?

At RailsWorld earlier this year, I got nerd sniped by someone. They asked “why can’t Bundler be as fast as uv?” Immediately my inner voice said “YA, WHY CAN’T IT BE AS FAST AS UV????” My inner voice likes to shout at me, especially when someone asks a question so obvious I should have thought of it myself. Since then…

2924

Distributed Systems Shibboleths

Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.

2931

How UTF-8 Works

If you're anything like me, you love emojis! Emojis appear like an image on the screen, but they aren't an image like a PNG or JPEG. What do emojis look like to computers? 

0x820x820x980...

2933

Bun v0.8

Bun gets debugger support, fetch streaming, and `bun update`. ReadStream and WriteStream from `node:tty` are implemented, including raw mode on `process.stdin`. SvelteKit now works in Bun. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

2938

Biggest image in the smallest space

What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…