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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 744 posts.

Software Engineering
2012
124

JRuby 1.7.0. Released

After a long journey (1.5 years..oh my) we have released JRuby 1.7.0. The JRuby 1.7 release series represents a tremendous amount of work by dozens of contributors, and there are improvements in every subsystem. Users of highly-concurrent applications will see improvements in throughput and raw parallelism. And JRuby…

126

Small

Looking down from his perch on the edge of space [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I], Felix Baumgartner remarked: > Sometimes you have to be really high, to see how small you really are. It turns out that this feeling is a well documented phenomena dubbed the Overview effect [http:

140

One sentence per line, please

I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…

146

Programmer Time Translation Table

An experienced project manager I used to work with claimed that he took the programmers’ time estimates, multiplied by pi and converted to the next time magnitude to get the true number. 1 day converts to 3.14 weeks. He had learned the hard way that programmers are bad at estimating times . To get a more precise…