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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
Summary: jq rocks for speedy JSON mangling. Use it to make powerful git clean filters, e.g. when stripping out unwanted cached-data from Jupyter notebooks. You can find the documentation of git 'clean' and 'smudge' filters buried in the page on git-attributes , or see my example setup below.
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 3. LLVM
Every couple of years, the hope surfaces that a simple graphical interface will replace teams of developers. Business people to quickly and easily create beautiful expressions of their ideas and launch them into production seamlessly. A handful of startups in every generation take up this challenge, and they mostly…
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
I’m a massive fan of everything Fabien Sanglard does, I love his blog and I’ve read both his books cover-to-cover (for more info on his books, check out the recent Hansleminutes podcast).
It’s one of the most repeated phrases in software, but is also quite easy to forget - you spend more time reading code than you do writing it. According to the…
(the pictured dish is apparently materials for “Buddha Jumps Over The Wall”, named for its ability to seduce away vegetarians – sadly it uses shark fin so has some ethical issues&…
On April 27, 2019, I gave a talk on how to use OpenBSD to write better software at CarolinaCon 15 in Charlotte.
For many types of applications, at times it is necessary to pause the running of the program until some external condition occurs. You may need to wait until another thread finishes, or maybe until a…
Lists are rather hardware-unfriendly data structure. However, having a closer look at why is that and what can be done to improve this can provide an interesting insight into how high-level algorithms performance is affected by the processor microarchitecture.
I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…
Leif Singer, an engineer at Automattic, tells us about interviewing for a remote job at Automattic.
Context matters. Sometimes we need to get things done, sometimes we need to build things to last.
In order to hide your IP address and to try and limit throttling when web scraping, it might be a good idea to use a proxy such as Tor. This post describes how to use Python based web scraping tools and Tor to hide yourself when scraping websites for data. However, it can also be used more broadly when using Python to…
A tiny, strict, impure, curried, dynamically typed (although that may change), partially applied language with rather peculiar syntax.
Started on 9th May, 2019 it took almost five months to finish. It again puts the tutorial in a place I am happy with for now, and it will likely stay there for quite some time. Given the priorities and circumstances in my life, I don’t expect to keep working on it for time to come.
Optimizing compilers are a mainstay of modern software: allowing a programmer to write code in a language that makes sense to them, while transforming it into a form that makes sense for the underlying hardware to run efficiently. The optimizing compiler's job is to figure out what your input program does, and create…
There is something very exciting I have to show to you today: a completely rewritten notification system for Plasma that will be part of our next feature update 5.16 to be released in June.
I had been programming in Fortran and assembler for a number of years when I got my first personal computer. It was exciting. On the first generation PC one had to toggle in a paper tape loader from front panel switches, byte by byte, then start the paper tape reader and then one could output to the led on the front…
At the beginning of this decade (2010), a few of us Haskellers were exploring how best to do client-side web programming. We didn’t want to write JavaScript. There’s a surprising number of techniques we tried to avoid doing so. There was work coming from academia and industry. Here’s a history of my own experience in…
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
There is a misconception that Lisp is a dynamically typed language and doesn’t offer compile-time type checking. Lisp being the…
You’re making morning drip coffee. You need to make 2 cups. Do you:
I hear more voices saying [https://hackernoon.com/the-myth-of-software-time-estimations-576a7466d91a] there is little point in doing time-based estimations on how long building software will take, and thus we should just stop doing it. "Let's just use story points and estimate complexity, but not
This is the inaugural issue of Cryptography Dispatches, meant to be quick, frequent and lightly edited discussions of cryptographic topics. Longer form can be found at blog.filippo.io. If you are not reading this in your email client, you can subscribe here .
