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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.

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8500

I am a puts debuggerer

Update (2023-06-28): Added “I required a file, but I want to know what files were actually loaded” I love puts debugging I am a puts debuggerer. I don’t say this to disparage people that use a Real Debugger. I think Real Debuggers are great, I’ve just never taken the time to learn one well. Every time I try to lean…

8506

Data Still Dominates

I’m a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it’s one of the reasons git has been fairly successful… I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important…

8507

Django Advice

For the past year and a half or so I've been working full-time at Dumbwaiter Design doing Django development. I've picked up a bunch of useful tricks along the way that help me work, and I figured I'd share them.

8510

Sorting in Emacs

In this article, we will perform a series of hands-on experiments that demonstrate the various Emacs commands that can be used to sort text in different ways. There is sufficient documentation available for these commands in the Emacs and Elisp manuals. In this article, however, we will take a look at some concrete…

8513

Debugging in Vim

Vim 8.1 was released in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termdebug, which provid…

8514

Half of curl’s vulnerabilities are C mistakes

I spent a lot of time and effort digging up the numbers and facts for this post! Lots of people keep referring to the awesome summary put together by a friendly pseudonymous "Tim" which says that "53 out of 95" (55.7%) security flaws in curl could've been prevented if curl had been written in Rust. … Continue reading…

8516

Speeding up Rails startup time

In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative.