The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
This weekend I was talking with a friend about how I'd planned and estimated a huge software project in one of my previous jobs. By that I mean not something which can be done by a single team in a sprint or two, but something which requires several teams, across several quarters of effort, involving many other…
namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose. With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for? In this article, I address this question, and give a few examples from real code.
EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much interest. Just to be clear, using the constant is a very bad idea in almost every situation I can think of. Even instructions like RCPSS should only be used by people who are convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it (or don’t have any other choice). Subtracting from…
In some previous blog posts we described in details how one can generalize automatic differentiation to give automatically stability enhancements and all sorts of other niceties by incorporating graph transformations into code generation. However, one of the things which we didn’t go into too much is the limitation of…
Yesterday's post enumerated # blog-topics related to understanding and using shell. Today's post started out as a "grab bag" of other topics, but is now centered around problems with # distributed-systems .
Are cross-project changes in a single atomic commit the key advantage of monorepos? I do not think so.
NSO Group, the Israeli cyberweapons arms manufacturer behind the Pegasus spyware—used by authoritarian regimes around the world to spy on dissidents, journalists, human rights workers, and others—was hacked. Or, at least, an enormous trove of documents was leaked to journalists. There’s a lot to read out there…
T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…
This week a group of global newspapers is running a series of articles detailing abuses of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. If you haven’t seen any of these articles, they’re worth re…
The Clojure Core team recently released a new Clojure library, tools.build , that is a culmination of thought around batteries-included build support for Clojure projects. I won’t go into detail around the history and contents of the library in this post because much of that is found elsewhere, including the…
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...
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read - (At Least Twice)
How My Mindfulness Practice Lead Me To Meltdown
Homepage of Florian Echtler
Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even…
As software developers, we're always learning new things; it's practically the whole gig! If we can learn to quickly pick up new languages/frameworks/tools, we'll become so much more effective at our job. It's sort of a superpower.
Back in 2007, I was searching for a software developer job at various companies. At one of these companies, the best strategy to get the job was to give a wrong answer. If this seems weird to you, let me explain what happened.
"JVM Anatomy Quarks" is the on-going mini-post series, where every post is describing some elementary piece of knowledge about JVM. The name underlines the fact that the single post cannot be taken in isolation, and most pieces described here are going to readily interact with each other.
I graduated from college in 1997. While at college, the Netscape IPO, Yahoo IPO, eBay IPO, and Amazon IPO all happened. When I graduated, I…
This is a tale of first world problems, culminating in me being pissed off about getting a free phone--so I'll say up front: Yes, I know this is petty and silly, but also, I'm furious with how AT&T has handled their transition off 3G and I'm here to complain about it.
The primary admin account on an M1 Mac is its Owner, responsible for authorising the installation and use of second operating systems. Here’s what can go wrong with Ownership.
This is a chronicle of my experiment where I set out to insert 1B rows in SQLite
A glimpse of the upcoming paradigm shift in how we do development
I like to learn about business through writing. Day Job: Helping founders with their VC pitches at deckrooster.com. Past: Goldman Sachs, IIM Bangalore
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
I'm always in the market for surprising facts. One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye. It's hard to believe since it appears that we see blue clearly, but it's astonishing when shown an example. Here', I'll explain why we're unable to focus on blue, and show examples of…
