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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
2016
158

Beating the Compiler

An oft-repeated fact on programming forums these days is that a decent optimizing compiler will always beat a puny human's attempt at hand-written assembler. There are rare cases, like MPEG decoders, where making good use of the SIMD instructions can allow assembly to massively beat the compiler. But generally you'll…

173

A Rebuttal for Python 3

Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu

174

Curl Security Audit

"the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive." I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing … Continue…

178

The Case Against Python 3

This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…