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The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
13262
Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities. This article…
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Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far
Disclaimer: This story took place when I was a junior developer for a previous employer ages ago. Some details might be fuzzy, and goes without saying this is entirely from my own POV so take everything here with humor and a grain of salt.
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Makefiles for web work
A set of recipes for using Makefiles for web development.
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Hopefully more controversial programming opinions
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Best Practices for Testing in Java (2019)
Modern best practices for unit tests and integration tests in Java and in general
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Let's stop building APIs around a network hack (2017)
JSON-API has been one of the most popular standards for API development for a while now. It was conceived in 2013, battled through some rather different RC versions (changing drastically as it went), finally stabilizing with v1.0 back in mid-2015. My interest in JSON-API has changed
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Some thoughts on personal Git hosting
As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested…
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Why is hash(-1) == hash(-2) in Python?
While browsing Reddit the other day waiting for my code to compile, I ran across this question on r/Python: is hash(-1) == hash(-2) an easter egg? Wait, is that really true? $ python Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 29 2021, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.1.1 20210531 (Red Hat 11.1.1-3)] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or…
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The importance of local development
Efficient software development benefits from local development, it enables faster iteration, better debugging and ensures consistency between local and production environments.
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Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)
How I learnt Elm (its good parts and bad) by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React.
13273
JavaScript string encoding
Node string encoding is all over the place. Let's try to straighten out how it works.
13274
Formalising a new proof that the square root of two is irrational
Recently, somebody shared on Twitter a new proof of the irrationality of √2. Its claimed advantage is that “it requires no knowledge of mathematics above the definition of what it means for a number to be irrational, and can be written almost in one line.” These claims are dubious: the usual proof, which I’ve…
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Replacing Pandas with Polars
I remember those days, oh so long ago, it seems like another lifetime. I haven’t used Pandas in many a year, decades, or whatever. We’ve all been there, done that. Pandas I mean. I would dare say it’s a rite of passage for most data folk. For those using Python, it’s probably one of the […]
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Tcl/tk vs. the web
I agree with you. How is it that in order to build an application on the web I need to know at least seven technologies? Client side: - Javascrit - Coffescript to make JS seem sane - Angular or Jquery to make JS seem productive - CSS - SASS to make CSS seem sane - HTML5 - localstorage (to save somethnig) Server side …
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Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard challenge
Short term financing makes it possible to acquire highly sought-after domains without the strain of upfront costs. Find your domain name today.
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Coreutils Gotchas (2015)
Confusing corners of the unix utilities
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Game Programming Patterns – Bytecode
Give behavior the flexibility of data by encoding it as instructions for a virtual machine.
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GCC and C vs C++ Speed, Measured
With the imminent release of gcc 4.8, GCC has finally switched to C++ as the implementation language. As usual, LWN has excellent coverage. Those with long memories will remember Linux trying to use g++ back in 1992 and retreating in horror at the larger, slower code. The main benefit was stricter typechecking…
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Haskell’s State monad is not a monad (2014)
Haskell’s State monad has a shameful secret. It’s not a monad [ State monads don’t respect the monad laws in Haskell, Simon Marlow ] . Look:
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Going Simple with JavaScript
I was making a change to a page that needed to pull from a remote API and make changes to various parts of the page. Sounds like the time to pull out jQuery and Ajax, doesn't it? Instead, I just u...
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