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Why do we call it “boilerplate code?”
Etymology is fun!
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,001 posts.
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Programming breakthroughs we need
Matyáš Racek's blog
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Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)
It’s quite popular to bash the Windows Registry in non-technical or lightly technical terms. I’ve just spent a couple of weeks reverse engineering the binary format completely for our h…
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Appeal to Ruby Community from Kharkiv Rubyist
I write to Ruby community in days of war Russia leads against my country.
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Raspberry Pi security alarm – the basics
In November last year — I started building a DIY security alarm system, using a Raspberry Pi as the controller. My plan was to make a self-sustained system, using proper alarm hardware — like PIR sensors and sirens. Integration with Home Assistant would be an add-on, not a requirement. I wanted the system to be as…
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Why do arrays start at 0?
It's not the reason you think. No, it's not that reason either.
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What they don't teach you about sockets
In order to effectively write applications that communicate via sockets, there were some realizations I needed to make that weren't explicitly told to me by any of the documentation I read.
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An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews (2020)
Over the past few years, I’ve interviewed with a dozen or so companies and have completed ~50 or so individual algorithm problems. I’m frequently given feedback that I did a great job at the algorithms problem. In this post, I’m going to share how exactly I approach algorithm problems. Thought Process A guiding…
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Web automation: Don't use Selenium, use Playwright
For web automation/testing, Selenium has been the de facto "standard" since forever. It's simple to get started with and supports almost every programming language. My problem with it has been: It's good enough, but nothing more. It doesn't work that well with modern, Javascript framework heavy sites (Angular, React
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Crimes with Python's pattern matching
Let's make the CPython team regret adding pattern matching to Python!
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What's TypeScript compiling? Use a treemap to find out
Has TypeScript gotten slow for you? Run this one magic command to visualize what TypeScript is compiling, and maybe get to the root of the issue.
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I would like a job writing Haskell
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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What’s so great about functional programming anyway?
To hear some people talk about functional programming, you’d think they’d joined some kind of cult. They prattle on about how it’s changed the way they think about code. They’ll extol the benefits of purity, at length. And proclaim that they are now able to “reason about their code”—as if all other code is irrational…
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Emacs 29 is nigh
Table of Contents Major features Eglot is now part of Emacs core Tree-Sitter is also part of Emacs core Install packages from source with package.el Org mode 9.6 use-package in Emacs core Pure GTK Emacs is here for Wayland! Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time Native access to SQLite databases HaikuOS support New…
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New JSON query operators in SQLite 3.38.0
SQLite 3.38.0 introduced improvements to JSON query syntax using -> and ->> operators that are similar to PostgreSQL JSON functions. In this post we...
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Useless Use of "dd" (2015)
tl;dr: dd works for reading and writing disks, but it has no "low level I/O" capabilities that make it more suited for this than any other shell utility. Like cat you should use it where it makes sense, e.g. to take advantage of its wide array of options, rather than try to ensure that all disk related commands begin…
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The pocket guide to debugging
New zine: The Pocket Guide to Debugging
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WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas
WebGPU is an upcoming Web API that gives you low-level, general-purpose access GPUs.
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Writing a Game Boy Emulator in OCaml
For the past few months, I have been working on a project called CAMLBOY, a Game Boy emulator that runs in the browser.
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The collapse of complex software
In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great…
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Idiot Proof Git
Aliases, etc that have made rebase-based workflows in Git much less advanced feeling.
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Cut the cutesy errors
If your app has just ruined my day, I need help, not humour.
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Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
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Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast …
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Terraform should have remained stateless
For major providers, Terraform does not really need state. My proposal: add a ’none’ backend that uses the provider APIs as state. Here’s how.
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C Isn't a Programming Language Anymore
Phantomderp and I have both recently been very aligned on a particular subject: being extremely angry about C ABIs and trying to fix them . Where we’re not aligned is why we’re mad about them.