1411
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.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
1412
Why Create a New Unix Shell?
This post explains the project's motivation from several perspectives. Unix shell is an old and successful technology, so there are many ways of looking at it.
1413
Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)
Why does it take so long to build software? We hear variations of this question frequently: Why is building software so expensive? Why is my team delivering software so slowly? Why am I perpetually behind schedule with my software? There is a good reason we hear these questions over and over. Businesses need more and…
1414
Python's Type Checking Renaissance
You may have heard that TypeScript has been taking the web development space by storm in the last few years , bringing to it static types. I believe the same thing is starting to happen in the world of Python, where type checkers like mypy , Pyre , and Pyright are increasingly used, at least where Python is used by…
1415
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…
1416
Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 Nodes
We’ve scaled Kubernetes clusters to 7,500 nodes, producing a scalable infrastructure for large models like GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL·E, but also for rapid small-scale iterative research such as Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.
1417
Improving how we deploy GitHub
As GitHub doubled it’s developer head count, tooling that worked for us no longer functioned in the same capacity. We aimed to improve the deployment process for all developers at GitHub and mitigate risk associated with deploying one of the largest developer platforms in the world.
1418
Racket Compiler and Runtime Status
posted by Matthew Flatt With the upcoming version 8.0 release, Racket on Chez Scheme (Racket CS) will become the default implementation of Racket. This report discusses the implications of that change, continuing a series that was originally about Racket...
1419
Software engineering topics I changed my mind on
At some point, I realized I would've argued the exact opposite position on a lot of topics just a few years ago.
1420
DrScheme in Space
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
1421
Command Path Security in Go
How to decide if your programs are vulnerable to PATH problems, and what to do about it.
1422
1423
Making Win32 APIs More Accessible to More Languages
Introduction Win32 APIs provide powerful functionality that let you get the most out of Windows in your applications. While these APIs are readily accessible to C and C++ developers, other languages like C# and Rust require wrappers or bindi
1424
Basic Scripting with Awk and Gnuplot
Posted to HN. Comments and discussion highly encouraged. Introduction This will be a short example-based guide to (a) awk (b) gnuplot and (c) using them in a script. I needed to graph some data based on the output of a command run a couple times. So what better way to solve that five minute task than to spend an hour…
1425
How to Build an Escrow Product
Escrow is a payment setup where the payer sends funds to a third party rather than directly to the payee. If certain conditions are met, the third party routes the funds to the recipient; if not, the funds get returned to the sender. Escrow is particularly useful for high value payments because the payer can rely on…
1426
VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker
Long term readers of this blog will know our devotion to using container-based technology, especially Docker, to significantly improve software quality through repeatable builds. In the Autumn/fall of 2020, Microsoft introduced a Visual Studio Code (VSCode) extension Remote – Containers. With one quick stroke, this…
1427
The right way to turn off your old APIs
All things come to an end, even HTTP APIs. However great your API may be today, one day you'll want to release a completely new version, an improved but...
1428
Knuth-Morris-Pratt string-searching algorithm: DFA-less version
You see, there are two memory accesses per one character of the input string (at average). Hence, the total number of all memory accesses can be len*2 at worst.
1429
Cgit, Nginx and Gitolite: A Personal Git Server
Hi'ya I'm Bryan, and this is my collection of projects, ideas, thoughts, feelings, opinions, ramblings, concepts, concerns, notions, conclusions, blurbs, and schemes, to name a few.
1430
Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
The release of Apple Silicon based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news and some surprises at the machine’s performance.
1431
Flow-Based Programming
Official website for flow-based programming
1432
Java on Truffle – Going Fully Metacircular
Up until now, GraalVM has offered two ways to run Java programs: using the Java HotSpot VM with the GraalVM JIT (just-in-time) compiler…
1433
Python 3's F-Strings: An Improved String Formatting Syntax
Python f-strings give you a readable, concise way to interpolate and format strings, and they beat .format() and the % operator on speed.
1434
Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing
André Garzia made a nice blog post called “Lua, a misunderstood language” recently, and unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) a bulk of HN comments on it was about the age-old 0-based vs. 1-based indexing debate. You see, Lua uses 1-based indexing, and lots of programmers claimed this is unnatural because “every…
1435
1436
User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
This short story is not really about htop, or about the feature request that I’ll use as an illustration, but about what are the core principles that drive the development of a bit of software, down to every last detail. And by “core principles” I really mean it.
1437
When costs are nonlinear, keep it small
Batching work is more efficient … until cost rises nonlinearly with batch size. Then smaller batches are the most efficient. So don’t delay maintenance!
1438
Software engineering is a learning process, working code is a side effect
I have come to the conclusion that Software Engineering is primarily a learning endeavour, the working code is rather a side effect. This quote is actually not mine but I am paraphrasing Alberto Brandolini who is making this very point in Event Storming (he was actually talking about Software Development, but I do not…
1439
How I Build Web Apps As A Freelancer
It's now roughly seven or eight years that I'm building dynamic front ends for the web. From digital art wallets to games (1, 2) and synthesizers, I've seen it all. And since my process
1440
Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…