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Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
Notable programmers describe understanding and coding in LISP as a semi-religious experience. What gives the language this power?
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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How I Judge the Quality of Documentation
As a developer, you develop instincts for judging quality of code. One of my favorite interview questions is: When you look at a project’s code for the first time, what are the things you look for?...
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Create No-JavaScript friendly sites
Create usable sites, even if JavaScript is blocked
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I don't love the single responsibility principle
Did you ever happen to disagree with a colleague on the single responsibility principle and its application? Let's try to understand why that could be the case.
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Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)
Sorting Japanese is not only difficult—it’s an unsolved problem. This seems hard to believe if you are not familiar with the complexities of processing Japanese digitally. But what is trivially easy in English is impossible in Japanese, even with the amount of computer power we have available today.
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Can you trust a compiler to optimize your code?
More or less the title this time, but first, a story about SIMD. There are three levels of understanding how SIMD works (well, at least I am level 3 at the moment):
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I wrote a Ruby extension in Zig
Just my website. Some Elixir, some Ruby, some more exotic languages and general thoughts on tech.
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Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
Teaching our five year old daughter to code by cheating.
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A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch
This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the…
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Why it took 4 years to get a lock files specification
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
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Getting started with vim
Luca Pette's website
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Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up …
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Dependent types and how to get rid of them
are-dependent-types-actually-erased - Chad Nauseam Home
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In C++, is empty() faster than comparing the size with zero?
Most C++ programmers rely on "STL" for their data structures. The most popular data structure is probably vector, which is just a dynamic array. The set and the map are other useful ones. The STL data structures are a minimalist design. You have relatively few methods. All of them allow you to compute the size ……
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Making 1M requests with Python-aiohttp
In this post I’d like to test limits of python aiohttp and check its performance in terms of requests per minute. Everyone knows that asynchronous code perf...
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Idiomatic Redux: Implementation and Intent
Thoughts on what Redux requires, how Redux is intended to be used, and what is possible with Redux
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C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma
C++26 brings us a small but meaningful cleanup to the language: deprecating ellipsis parameters without a preceding comma. This change, proposed in P3176R1, aims to improve C compatibility, reduce confusion, and pave the way for future language features. The proposal’s name is a playful reference to the Oxford comma …
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Comparing JVM alternatives to JavaScript
I am mostly a backend developer, but every now and then I need to do some frontend work. Even if just for personal use.
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Insecurities in the Linux /dev/random
New paper: “Security Analysis of Pseudo-Random Number Generators with Input: /dev/random is not Robust, by Yevgeniy Dodis, David Pointcheval, Sylvain Ruhault, Damien Vergnaud, and Daniel Wichs. Abstract: A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is…
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Ruby 3 JIT can make Rails faster
I’ve wondered Why Rails becomes slow with JIT for a long time. Today, I’m pleased to share my answer to the question in this article, which…
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Understanding the Y Combinator
This article is about the Y combinator, a fixed-point combinator that provides a way of using recursion in scenarios and programming languages where symbols are not available. The concept of the Y combinator itself is closely related to lambda calculus (λ-calculus) and functional programming languages. More…
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React, JSX, and CoffeeScript
Tips on using React without JSX.
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