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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,843 posts.

Software Engineering
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19417

Typographic Programming Language

Allow me to present a simple thought experiment. Suppose we didn’t need to store our code as ASCII text on disk. Could we change the way we write – and more importantly read – symbolic code? Let’s assume we have a magic code editor which can read, edit, and write anything we can imagine. Furthermore, assume we have a…

19433

Why We Use Go

Go is decidedly polarizing. While many are touting their transition to Go, it has become equally fashionable to criticize and mock the language. As Bjarne Stroustrup so eloquently put it, “There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.” This adage couldn’t be…

19437

What Is Idempotence?

Idempotence means duplicates don't matter. It means you can safely retry an operation with no issues. The classic example is the elevator button: you press it twice and it does not call two elevators. We explore why we would want that property in an email server.