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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 599 posts.
I find that I operate in one of two modes when I’m writing software. I’m either approaching a project as a quick hack or as developing software . As much as anything else, this affects how I approach the project and what kinds of results that I get.
Simulated annealing is a method for finding a good (not necessarily perfect) solution to an optimization problem. If you're in a situation where you want to maximize or minimize something, your problem can likely be tackled with simulated annealing.
I did it. It wasn't easy, but I did it. My C Compiler can compile itself. Even though it still has holes in functionality and obvious bug...
UNIX (well, POSIX) signals are probably one of the worst parts of the UNIX API, and that’s a relatively high bar. A signal can be sent to your program at any point when it’s running, and you have to deal with it somehow. Traditionally, there are three ways …
I've been noticing more and more lately that we have a plethora of libraries and programs written for Go, which don't work on one platform o...
In February I open-sourced a library called Specter , and in my own work it has become by far my m...
This week I finished shutting down my app-detection service, iHasApp . I disabled the signup forms, grandfathered the current users on their plans, sent out emails, and updated the landing page with a message to any new visitors. After all of this, I thought it might be interesting to chronicle what it was, how it…
The rise of the meta-designer, and the use of algorithmic design systems.
An example of a monadic programming in Scheme that juxtaposes Haskell code for a state monad with the corresponding Scheme code.
In almost every computation a great variety of arrangements for the succession of the processes is possible, and various considerations must influence the selection amongst them for the purposes of a Calculating Engine. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time…
I am a Vim user. And a Vim fan.I was fiddling around for some time, you know, just knowing the basics, because it is convenient to do small changes on servers without having to worry about installi…
Monad is a design pattern used to describe computations as a series of steps. They manage side effects in pure functional languages but can also be used in other languages to control complexity.
The problem is that the last param to xhr.open is whether the xhr is async . Ouch.
T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes!
I spent the last weekend working through the amazing guide for Make a Lisp , writing a Lisp interpreter in Nim. The final result just made it into the repository.
Adblockers as the reason of InvalidAccessError
Update 12/7/2012 @ 13:46: Peter Ferrie smashed my record by a single byte, so the record is now held by him at 12 bytes. Congrats, and I feel like a fool for missing it :-) I’ve tacked on h…
In Star Versus’s two player mode, the first thing players see is a menu to select their ships, handicaps, and arenas. Although straight forward in concept, this menu actually maxes out the NES’s graphics in multiple ways. Specifically, it uses each available palette, requires all 64 sprites, and places 8 sprites onto…
Today’s programming landscape is dynamic and polyglot . Interlanguage interoperability is a mainstay — it’s almost unavoidable that a given piece of code will be used without the knowledge of the original author.
