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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 373 posts.

2010
304

Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice

First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby

308

Me vs Backspace: my war against a rogue character

A while ago, I began receiving reports from various people in IRC that I was prepending a garbage ascii character to some of my messages. I found this very odd. The complaints didn’t stop. It became a running joke. Eventually, playful mockery. It is a bit demeaning to hang out in programmer corners and not have any…

311

The Future of Compiler Optimization

Hello, My name is Nadav and I am a PhD candidate, researching compilers for embedded systems and high-level synthesis. This is an excellent post and I enjoyed reading it. I have a few comments. 1. I agree about verification and optimization joining forces. We already see it to some extent with compiler warnings. 2…

312

Building blocks of a scalable webcrawler.

In my last semester as a student, I had the chance of working for an awesome company ( Acquia ) on a very interesting project. It all started with a post over at Dries Buytaert's blog. He is the CTO and co-founder of Acquia (and Mollom), inventor of Drupal, open-source celebrity and also knows a thing or two about…

327

A micro-manual for Lisp implemented in C

Recently I had to go through some code that uses the uIP TCP/IP stack, which reminded me, it has been a long time since I did something in C so I ended up spending the weekend implementing the 10 rules John McCarthy described in his paper A Micro-Manual for Lisp - not the whole Truth .

328

Life in Text Mode

I primarily use Unix-based computers, mostly Linux. On those computers, I live in text mode. This entry is an attempt to document the software I find most useful to my text-mode guerrilla lifestyle. Included are links to the programs I rely on, links to alternative programs, and links to my config files. screen…