Topics /

Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 653 posts.

2014
512

How to design an elliptic-curve signature system

Earlier this month a new paper by Naomi Benger, Joop van de Pol, Nigel Smart, and Yuval Yarom hit the news . The paper explains how to recover secret keys from OpenSSL's implementation of ECDSA-secp256k1 using timing information from "as little as 200 signatures"; ECDSA-secp256k1 is the signature system used by…

515

Building a F1 race simulator

One of the most fascinating aspects of modern Formula 1 is the use of computer simulations to predict car performances and race strategies. By the early 1990s, teams like Benetton had begun to deve…

516

Sherlock Holmes Debugging

I use the Sherlock Holmes method of debugging software. This means working backwards from a symptom to the series of causes which tell a story of the entire bug. It works for production outages and during development. Something that recently happened at my startup should be instructive.

522

Lisp: More is less

There’s recently been a resurgence of interest in Lisp (specifically, Clojure) in my neighborhood. I have some kind of a fondness for Lisp, but I think some of its characteristics make it poorly suited for use in large programming efforts. Indeed many of the unique properties that Lisp devotees (myself once included)…

526

Software Checklist

During the second World War, fighter pilots would scramble to take off. As they bumbled down the grass runway, engines open at full throttle, trying to take off on a short, bumpy track with a full load of fuel and ammunition, their heart would stop when the engine mis-fired. Was the fuel mix too rich, or too lean?…

531

Reverse Engineering Strike Commander

Back in the early 90s, one company was on the bleeding edge of PC gaming: Origin Systems . Their motto was "We Create Worlds" and boy did they deliver: With the Ultima series, Crusader series and Wing Commander series, they consistently took gamer's breath away. One of them took four years and more than a million man…

534

Great Programmers (2004)

I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…

537

The Computer Graphics Library

Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…