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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,543 posts.

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10331

The Modern CLI Renaissance

Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line…

10332

Why do interviewers ask linked list questions?

A couple years back I gave a talk on researching software history, using “linked list interview questions” as an example topic. Since referring people to a video is less accessible than just writing a blog post, I’ve reproduced the question here. So why do interviewers like to ask linked list questions? If you ask…

10334

Why C++ Is Not "Back"

There are plenty of excellent developers I know today that still use C++ and teach others how to use it and there is nothing at all wrong with that. So what is the problem then? Why is C++ not "back"?

10335

My deployment platform is a shell script

my deployment platform is a shell script 2024-04-09 like many people, i fell in love with free software because i could install it. i'd come home from work and install a bunch of software. what fun! tee hee! a playground and i'm the prince! but eventually, relentlessly, it all starts to feel more like a horror show…

10337

Bitten by Unicode

One product of mine takes reports that come in as a table that’s been exported to PDF, which means text extraction. For dollar figures I find a prefixed dollar symbol and convert the number following it into a float . If there’s a hyphen in addition to the dollar symbol, it’s negative.

10340

Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem

My response to the discussion topic posed in Python Packaging Strategy Discussion Part 1 had become quite long, so I decided to move it to write a blog post instead. This post then started absorbing various draft posts I’ve had on this topic since this blog was started, morphing to include my broader thoughts on where…

10342

An Intuition for Lisp Syntax

Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.