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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.

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5343

Fast line-following robots

Since February 2016, I have been participating in DIYRobocars meetups here in the SF Bay Area, wherein a bunch of amateur roboticists compete in autonomous time trials with RC cars. I had been doing very well in the competition with essentially just a glorified line-following robot, but have lately upgraded to a full…

5344

Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)

Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…

5355

Easy Forth (2015)

This small ebook is here to teach you a programming language called Forth. Forth is a language unlike most others. It’s not functional or object oriented, it doesn’t have type-checking, and it basically has zero syntax. It was written in the 70s, but is still used today for certain applications .

5364

Preparing Yourself for Modern JavaScript Development

There is a lot going on in the JavaScript world these days, both in and out of the browser. Talk about script loaders, client side MVC frameworks, minifiers, AMD, Common.js, Coffeescript, can quickly get your head spinning. And for those people who are completely immersed in that world, it can be easy to forget that…

5367

Inside the C Standard Library

After diving into the C language through K&R, and then studying portability (see C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines ), my next challenge was to take a systematic look at the standard library. To do this I worked through P. J. Plauger’s book The Standard C Library (ISBN 978-0131315099) where he examines an…

5369

Matrices from a geometric perspective

Graphics is all about geometry. In particular, there are points that have a certain color, and the pattern of colors gives you a certain picture. You can change the way the points are distributed by applying certain transformations like translation (movement), rotation and scaling. While most people familiar with the…