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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
The world of tech moves fast, and there’s always new frameworks and paradigms popping up that make developers’ lives easier and allow us to build more and more powerful applications. But, these transitions don’t always just make things better for developers - sometimes we take steps backwards and undo the progress we…
This blog post shows tips and tricks to write resilient and idempotent bash scripts.
I was curious when the famous programmers do their work. And it is quite easy to find. The result of programmers work is a code. Code is stored in version control systems (VCS). When you put code in VCS the time is record.
I am an unusual beast. All my solo project games I've been making recently have been written in 'vanilla' C. Nobody does this. So I think it might be interesting to explain why I do.
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
You can process data that doesn’t fit in memory by using four basic techniques: spending money, compression, chunking, and indexing.
A short description and screenshot of some useful command line tools I use that aren't part of typical POSIX environment.
The network stack does several seemingly-impossible things. It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups. It adapts smoothly to network congestion. It provides addressing to billions of active nodes. It routes packets around damaged network infrastructure…
For years now I've had this itch, trying to find the "perfect" collaborative text editor. But not just any collaborative text editor, oh no, my speciality is finding (well, at least looking for) open source real-time collaborative web-based rich text editors...
I recently updated minor and patch versions of the gems our Rails app uses. We want to keep dependencies fresh, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities addressed while maintaining a high chance ...
A simple explanation of how they work and how to implement one from scratch in Python.
Technical Debt is a metaphor for the consequences of cruft. You either have to accept a drag on further features (paying interest) or fix the software (paying the principal)
I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/distributed-architecture-concepts-i-have-learned-while-building-payments-systems/] , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs…
Full engine for the Wolfram Language can be deployed on any system--and called from programs, languages, web servers. Available for anyone to download, for free, to use in their software development projects.
I’ve written about lots of computer vision and machine learning projects like object recognition systems and face recognition projects. I…
Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:
A new edition of the book Modern C and much more are now available under a CC license via the following page This edition is the result of a collaboration with Manning, and improves a lot over the…
This post introduces paging, a very common memory management scheme that we will also use for our operating system. It explains why memory isolation i…
This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully.
Client-side navigation is supposed to make your pages load faster. But when I tried it, it was actually slower! Why?
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
Open Source, Web Development, and more
For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
