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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 537 posts.

2013
275

Lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions

Quick summary of my recommendations on compare-by-hash: If you are using compare-by-hash to generate addresses for data that can be supplied by malicious users, you should have a plan to migrate to a new hash every few years. For example, BitTorrent falls into this category, but rsync doesn't. Keep in mind that new…

279

Python and the Real-time Web

I had interview for the Flask book recently and some questions were related to realtime functionality - how it works, how to integrate realtime portion with conventional WSGI applications, how to structure application code and so on.

280

Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

Within the constraints of the Emacs environment, there are no limits. Emacs is built upon this principle; the Lisp principle. Make some small kernel of features. A substrate. Take care to make this substrate programmable (in any language, Emacs chooses Lisp), and then build the system upon it. Let users worry about…

285

Tests Are Overhyped

Let me lead off by saying that I don’t think tests are bad. I really don’t. But here’s the thing: I don’t care what your test-code ratios are. You know what the best test-code ratio is? Whatever you need to make sure your crap works while still getting product out the door.

290

Marelle: logic programming for devops

In the past, walking the uneasy borderline of academia, I used to managed compute servers for my research group. New hardware was a rare godsend, configuring it by hand was natural. At 99designs, I’ve been privy to the opposite approach: machines should be disposable. This requires the entire setup of a new machine to…

291

On Go

This is one of a series of posts on languages, you can read more about that here . A grab bag of observations on the Go programming language, positive and negative. It bucks some orthodoxy on what a good effective language is supposed to look like. It makes sensible engineering decisions and is sq

293

All of my side-projects from 2012

One of my favorite pastimes as a programmer is to work on personal projects outside of work. I use side-projects as a creative outlet to work on new and interesting things. I also use them as a learning exercise. If I start a side-project, there must be "one new thing" about the project I don't know how to do already…

296

Mod_python - the long story

This story started back in 1996. I was in my early twenties, working as a programmer at a small company specializing in on-line reporting of certain pharmaceutical data. There was a web-based application (which was extremely cool considering how long ago this was), but unfortunately it was written in Visual Basic by a…

300

Geohot presents an evasi0n7 writeup

Hi, I'm on a plane from SFO to New York, and made something for you. Not even a rap song. ******* geohot( @tomcr00se ) presents an evasi0n7 writeup ******* == Intro == I was bored, reversed, wrote this write-up, and wanted to do something with it. I tried to sell it to the Chinese for $7 and a trip to the Pizza Hut…