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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
To understand the differences between automatic differentiation libraries, let’s talk about the engineering trade-offs that were made. I would personally say that none of these libraries are “better” than another, they simply all make engineering trade-offs based on the domains and use cases they were aiming to…
Many years ago, I built what I believe was the best-selling BlackBerry app of all-time, BBSmart Email Viewer. It feels strange to write that, and it's not something I'd say I'm really known for outside of the small niche community of BlackBerry app developers that used to exist. But of course this had a huge impact on…
Introducing citations!
After reading countless articles about the wonders of Go, I wanted to learn more. But, learning a new language— I mean really learning it, not just getting familiar with the general capabilities and syntax—is hard. I'm sure there are tons of books that would purport to teach me all about it, but there is no substitute…
Updated (2023-05-08): the Go compiler keeps evolving and it takes time to keep up with changes. While the general gist of this post remains true and it's worth reading to understand how the compiler works on a high level, the details of the modifications are slightly different now.
Discussions: Hacker News (63 points, 8 comments), Reddit r/programming (312 points, 37 comments) Translations: Arabic, French, Spanish Update: Part 2 is now live: A Visual And Interactive Look at Basic Neural Network Math Motivation I’m not a machine learning expert. I’m a software engineer by training and I’ve had…
In 2001, Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote a letter to the Budget Council of The University of Texas. A PDF is available here , I’ve typed it up so that everyone can read it. Sadly, the curriculum was changed to Java . Relatedly, the algorithmic language Scheme was replaced by Python in MIT’s The Structure and Interpretation…
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
Coming back to JavaScript and TypeScript after a few years neck deep in Python and Hack, I kept hitting a number of new, cryptic errors when running NodeJS code in my dev environment:
And other lessons learned from creating a popular open-source project (JSON5)
Syntax highlighters make value judgments about code. Most highlighters judge that comments are cruft, and try to hide them. Most diff viewers judge that code deletions are bad.
Easter egg; noun: An unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or a bonus. There are no Easter eggs in curl. For the good. I've been asked about this many times. Among the enthusiast community, people seem to generally like the concept of Easter eggs and hidden treasures, ……
I’ve used F# a lot in the last 3 years and for quite some time I wanted to collect a few good starting points to venture into F# in one place. I also wanted ...
The price of improving structure
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
A quiz to see how you compare to language models.
I show toy implementations of Python decorator patterns that may be useful for Data Scientists.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
You are a software engineer. Don't become a prompt refiner.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
I didn’t think I’d learn anything building Bootstrap. Actually, I was pretty confident I wouldn’t learn anything. As a technical challenge, Bootstrap just isn’t very interesting. It’s …
