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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
The phrase "favor composition over inheritance" has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we're missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led…
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be, and… I found I’m FP-pilled.
Part of my Python FAQ. I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
Laurent Le Brun's blog
Copying data wastes memory, and modifying/mutating data can lead to bugs. Learn how to implement a compromise between the two in Python: hidden mutability.
Joey Hess inspires me. He lives in a cabin and programs Haskell on a drastically under-powered netbook. He harvests all his electricity from the sun with a homemade electrical system. Joey has designed his computing life to be highly distributed like the git version control he loves. His internet connection is…
I have moved off Medium to a personal blog. Click here for the updated post.
A programmer's text editor is their castle
We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.
Learn how to setup and use vale, a syntax-aware prose linter with neovim for technical writing be it personal blogs or technical documentation.
Typical Age DE forum post: The pathfinding in the game is terrible. First off, Age of Empires Definitive Edition is a remaster of...
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
I learned about socat a few years ago and am generally surprised more developers don’t know about it. Maybe I appreciate it all the more…
Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is very helpful for those who need to see a quick reference to the code that could be causing a defect, but it’s wrong . Here’s what you need to do instead.
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…
In my puzzle collection , there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net , Slant , and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about…
You may have seen isolation levels in the documentation for your database, felt mildly uneasy, and went on with life. Few day-to-day examples of using transactions really mention isolation. Most use the database’s default isolation level and hope for the best. It’s a fundamental topic to understand however and you’ll…
