New

The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
19382

A case against syntax highlighting

Do you rely on syntax highlighting when developing software? If so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. In this post, I will argue that syntax highlighting, while aesthetically seductive, moves focus from content to form, and discourages those who look at the code from trying to understand it.

19391

Great Hackers (2004)

July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.'' I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste…

19404

Python for Data Analysis

I recommend using Python for data analysis, and I recommend Wes McKinney's book Python for Data Analysis. I prefer Python to R for mathematical computing because mathematical computing doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's always other stuff to do. I find doing mathematical programming in a general-purpose language is…

19408

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…

19410

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: