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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.

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13506

Managing Technical Quality in a Codebase

If there’s one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it’s that there’s a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren’t prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineers or retrain the ones we have. Of…

13508

VP trees: A data structure for finding stuff fast

<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/wavelet/cup.png"/> Let's say you have millions of pictures of faces tagged with names. Given a new photo, how do you find the name of person that the photo most resembles? <p> In the cases I mentioned, each record has hundreds or thousands of elements: the pixels in a photo, or patterns…

13511

Bloat reduction in LibreOffice 3.4.0

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13514

Revisiting Linux CPU Scheduling

Disclaimer: This is to the best of my knowledge. It's a complicated topic, there are tons of options, and this only covers a tiny fraction of this topic anyway. If you spot mistakes, please tell me.

13518

Dear Programming Job Applicants (2010)

This article is written with considerable snark–put on your flameproof suit if needed. I’m not actually a jerk when interviewing people, but I do get frustrated when candidates fail to do basic preparation. If you’re unsure about how to prepare for a programming interview, read on… I know this might come as a shock to…

13526

New integer types I’d like to see

(Most) C++ implementations provide at least 8, 16, 32, and 64-bit signed and unsigned integer types. There are annoying implicit conversions, discussions about undefined behavior on overflow (some think it’s too much UB, others think it’s not enough), but for the most part they do the job well. Newer languages like…

13527

Sylph: the programming language I want

Creating a programming language is apparently all the rage these days, and it’s got me thinking about what I would really like to see in one. I’m starting to suspect the things I want are either impossible or mutually incompatible, so I’d better write them down and let smarter people tell me why I can’t have…

13528

Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?

This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked "Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?" in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday. My response has two parts: Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated. Why I don't think it has to be that way. Why would…