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Don't Learn C the Wrong Way
Update : On Sep. 28, 2015, Zed Shaw wrote a rebuttal to this post. You can find the details here .
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,545 posts.
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Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)
A “ quine ” (or “ selfrep ”) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a…
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What webhooks are and why you should care
Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended…
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Mocks Aren't Stubs (2007)
Explaining the difference between Mock Objects and Stubs (together with other forms of Test Double). Also the difference between classical and mockist styles of unit testing.
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How to Ask Questions the Smart Way
Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .
14108
Detailed review of MIT's OCW course "Introduction to Algorithms", Part I: Analysis of Algorithms and Asymptotic Notation
I just finished watching the last lecture of MIT's "Introduction to Algorithms" course. Having a great passion for all aspects of computing, I decided to share everything I learned with you. This is the first post in an article series about this course. As I wrote earlier, I am very serious about watching video...
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Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
Wow, no comments? They must all be stuck on that bit about the "home row." Oh well... here's hoping some of those non-typists make it all the way through this piece.
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How To Become A Hacker
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
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Great Hackers (2004)
July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.'' I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste…
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Python in the Scientific World
Yesterday I attended a biweekly meeting of an informal a UC Berkeley group devoted to Python in science (Py4Science), organized by Fernando ...
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Clojure: It’s About the Libraries
There’s a big ‘ol thread going on down at comp.lang.lisp about Clojure vs. Common Lisp. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say that Clojure and Rich Hickey are holding their own against some of the top c.l.l. flamers.
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Parallelism is not concurrency
In an earlier post I mentioned that one goal of the new introductory curriculum at Carnegie Mellon is to teach parallelism as the general case of computing, rather than an esoteric, specialized sub…
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Embrace technical debt
Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Yet, especially in times like these, it’s easy t...
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Follow Hacker News from the Console
Here is something neat that I hacked together – a `top' like Python program called Hacker Top that allows you to follow Hacker News from a UNIX terminal! Hacker News has become the 2nd source for news after programming.reddit for me. I have a couple of ideas for a startup myself and the tips I get from Hacker News...