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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 247 posts.
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Strong software tips from 2000 that are 100% valid today
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
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Worse Is Better (2001)
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
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Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
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Event Sourcing (2005)
Capture all changes to an application state as a sequence of events.
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Software That Sucks Less
We are the home of quality software such as dwm , dmenu , st and plenty of other tools , with a focus on simplicity, clarity and frugality. Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector. Unfortunately, the tendency for…
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Monolith First (2015)
Going directly to a microservices architecture is risky, so consider building a monolithic system first. Split to microservices when, and if, you need it.
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Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy” (2009)
While working on an article for the Monad.Reader, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how people learn and gain intuition for abstraction, and the implications for pedagogy. The heart of …
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Clip: Connecting Text and Images
We’re introducing a neural network called CLIP which efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision. CLIP can be applied to any visual classification benchmark by simply providing the names of the visual categories to be recognized, similar to the “zero-shot” capabilities of GPT-2 and GPT-3.
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Mocks Aren't Stubs (2007)
Explaining the difference between Mock Objects and Stubs (together with other forms of Test Double). Also the difference between classical and mockist styles of unit testing.
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Git for Computer Scientists (2010)
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph .
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DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
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Overview ⚡ Zig Programming Language
Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge.
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Why Zig when there is already C++, D, and Rust?
If Zig code doesn’t look like it’s jumping away to call a function, then it isn’t. This means you can be sure that the following code calls only foo() and then bar() , and this is guaranteed without needing to know the types of anything:
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Git from the Bottom Up (2008)
Welcome to the world of Git. I hope this document will help to advance your understanding of this powerful content tracking system, and reveal a bit of the simplicity underlying it — however dizzying its array of options may seem from the outside.
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Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
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An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
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The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software (2005)
The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
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SQLite Archive Files (2018)
An "SQLite Archive" is a file container similar to a ZIP archive or Tarball but based on an SQLite database.
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Against SQL
But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is:
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Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
Microsoft Excel the programming language is evolving. With the recent release of LAMBDA, users can now define new functions in the program’s formula language. Learn about the capability and its role in the transformation of spreadsheet formulas.
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Manifest v3 Update
Manifest v3 support for Firefox extensions is coming in late 2021. See a high-level summary of changes to the platform.
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Bjarne Stroustrup: “I Did It for You All” (2007)
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE’s ‘Computer’ magazine..
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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic…
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WebAssembly and Back Again: Fine-Grained Sandboxing in Firefox 95
In Firefox 95, we're shipping a sandboxing technology called RLBox — developed with researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Texas
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A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...