Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,537 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
1329

In Praise of AutoHotKey

People think it’s weird that I do all my development on a Windows machine. It’s definitely a second-class citizen experience in the wider development world, and Windows has a lot of really frustrating issues, but it’s still my favorite operating system. This is for exactly one reason: AutoHotKey. AHK is an engine for…

1337

Typing the technical interview

In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling…

1349

Planner programming blows my mind

Picat is a research language intended to combine logic programming, imperative programming, and constraint solving. I originally learned it to help with vacation scheduling but soon discovered its planner module, which is one of the most fascinating programming models I’ve ever seen. First, a brief explanation of…

1350

Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving

Dynamic programming has a reputation as a technique you learn in school, then only use to pass interviews at software companies. Indeed, most developers do not regularly work on problems where dynamic programming is needed. Ultimately, dynamic programming is a technique for efficiently solving problems that can be…