Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
4801

Ruby's Creed

Every programming language has some fundamental idea(s) that drives its design and evolution. For Haskell that’s functional purity and state-of-the-art static typing, for Erlang that’s distributed programming and fault tolerance, for Clojure that’s simplicity and stability. What all these examples have in common is…

4802

Code reviews do find bugs

There’s some 2015 research out of Microsoft titled Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs 1 1 Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs; How the Current Code Review Best Practice Slows Us Down ; Czerwonka, Greiler, Tilford; IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering; 2015. which seems strangely named because reviewers do find…

4821

Use fast data algorithms (2021)

As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…

4829

How Tail Call Optimization Works

Most undergraduate computer sciences courses teach students about tail call optimization (TCO) , and even if you don't have a formal computer science background the concept is talked about enough that you might be familiar with it anyway, especially if you've ever done any functional programming. However, I think the…