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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,545 posts.

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14374

Understanding Ruby Blocks, Procs and Lambdas

Robert leads large and complex firms through mission-critical Digital Transformations with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Engineering. As a Presidential Innovation Fellow at Barack Obama's White House , Robert reformed digital services across the Federal Government, resulting in millions of veterans…

14375

On Python packaging

So currently there's a bit of a to-do involving Debian's Ruby packaging team and the Ruby "gem" system. [This document](http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html) …

14379

Staff archetypes

Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…

14380

Objects Have Not Failed

Here is some practical evidence: According to the most recent 2002 North American Developer Survey by Evans Data Corporation, over half the developers surveyed are using Java. About 1/7 of developers surveyed are using C#. Roughly half of those also use Java, so the fraction of surveyed developers using one or both is…

14381

The Magpie Developer

I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer

14382

bliki: Bounded Context

Don't try to build a single, unified model for a large domain. Instead DDD advises us to divide such a domain into many bounded contexts with explicit relationships between them.

14387

Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, 2nd Edition

The Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D, 2nd Edition has shipped. It is available at the following locations: - Amazon ( US , UK , FR , CA , and many more). - Google PlayStore ( here ). All errata which readers kindly took the time to report have been addressed. Adrian Carmack has retired from anything related to id…

14391

ha ha only serious

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…

14392

The Day The Standard Library Died

In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.

14394

gorilla arm

The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very…

14395

The CADT Model

In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:

14397

Top Down Operator Precedence

Vaughan Pratt presented "Top Down Operator Precedence" at the first annual Principles of Programming Languages Symposium in Boston in 1973. In the paper Pratt described a parsing technique that combines the best properties of Recursive Descent and Floyd 's Operator Precedence. It is easy to use. It feels a lot like…

14400

Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that