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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,536 posts.

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4592

JavaScript Needs Blocks

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby's blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript's "first class functions". Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both…

4593

Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

Yikes, looks like the new version of Outlook 20016 has broken the POP3 implementation. If you are currently using the “leave on server and delete after x days” function, the you should check your account because it seems like that the new Outlook is actually deleting your emails almost immediately after retrieving…

4594

The Mythical IO-Bound Rails App

When the topic of Rails performance comes up, it is commonplace to hear that the database is the bottleneck, so Rails applications are IO-bound anyway, hence Ruby performance doesn’t matter that much, and all you need is a healthy dose of concurrency to make your service scale. But how true is this in general?

4596

Writing a Service Worker

This website is for sale! hacklabo.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, hacklabo.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

4597

Probabilistic Filters By Example

Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…

4601

Replacing Elasticsearch with Rust and SQLite (2017)

Caveat: Elasticsearch is a multi-purpose, distributed, battle-tested, schema-free, log and document storage engine. We’ll be replacing it with a single-purpose, relational schema, me-tested, and custom nginx access log storage engine. Knowing that, let’s begin. Find this project on Github After building my home…

4612

UML: My Part in Its Downfall

In the last year or two there has been a slow but steady trickle of articles attempting to account for UML ’s lack of long-term success (if you have time for only one, I suggest Hillel Wayne’s article ). As fate would have it, I had some involvement in UML standardisation in the early 2000s, so I saw some of the…

4613

Just Use Go

Hey, dipshit. You know what compiles in two seconds, deploys as a single binary, and doesn't shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm at 3am? Go. The same way HTML has been sitting there since the dawn of the goddamn internet waiting for you to stop overcomplicating the frontend, Go has been…

4617

Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A. In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned with NeXT stagnation, id Software switched their development stack.

4618

Speedy Desktop Apps with GTK and Rust

The web platform is the delivery mechanism of choice for a ton of software these days, either through the web browser itself or through Electron, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for a good old fashioned straight-up desktop application in the picture.