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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.
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They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
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js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read. Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding. Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on…
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Fast midpoint between two integers without overflow
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…
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My struggle to learn React
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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When did people favor composition over inheritance?
The phrase "favor composition over inheritance" has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we're missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led…
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FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be, and… I found I’m FP-pilled.
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I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?
Part of my Python FAQ. I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?
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Use boring languages with LLMs
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
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Reformatting 100k Files at Google in 2011
Laurent Le Brun's blog
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Copying data is wasteful, mutating data is dangerous
Copying data wastes memory, and modifying/mutating data can lead to bugs. Learn how to implement a compromise between the two in Python: hidden mutability.
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Going “Write-Only”
Joey Hess inspires me. He lives in a cabin and programs Haskell on a drastically under-powered netbook. He harvests all his electricity from the sun with a homemade electrical system. Joey has designed his computing life to be highly distributed like the git version control he loves. His internet connection is…
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My experience rewriting Enjarify in Rust
I have moved off Medium to a personal blog. Click here for the updated post.
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Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
A programmer's text editor is their castle
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Garbage Collection
We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.
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Writing like a pro with Vale and Neovim
Learn how to setup and use vale, a syntax-aware prose linter with neovim for technical writing be it personal blogs or technical documentation.
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Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement
Typical Age DE forum post: The pathfinding in the game is terrible. First off, Age of Empires Definitive Edition is a remaster of...
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Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
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Socat – A utility for data transfer between two addresses (2018)
I learned about socat a few years ago and am generally surprised more developers don’t know about it. Maybe I appreciate it all the more…
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Don't link to line numbers in GitHub
Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is very helpful for those who need to see a quick reference to the code that could be causing a defect, but it’s wrong . Here’s what you need to do instead.
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Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…