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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.

2017
182

Introduction to R Programming

This is a detailed step-by-step introduction to R programming. Starting with the two major reasons to learn R for Data Science, it will guide you through the installation process, and prepare you for the basics of R: arithmetics, variables assignment, data types, functions, and documentations.

185

Hacker, Hack Thyself

We’ve read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if there

188

A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder

This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. You can find the source code here along with a test suite and benchmark:

191

Dynamic Progamming: First Principles

Many problems of todays world require multiple decisions made throughout the lifetime of the problem. Choices are made based upon information, including previous decisions made in the problem. This article looks at how Dynamic Programming can be applied to help solve these problems in an efficient manner.

192

Dear Postgres

Dear Postgres, I’ve always felt an affinity for you in my 9 years of working with you. I know others have known you longer, but that doesn’t mean they love you more. Years ago when others complained about your rigidness or that you weren’t as accommodating as others I found solace in your steadfast values: Don’t lose…

193

How Rust is tested

Rust is a systems programming language with massive ambitions. It is designed for creating the most reliable software, from the tiniest embedded systems to multi-million line behemoths, and its users need to have confidence that it is fit for purpose.

197

Good books for deep hacks

For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…

202

Papers I like

This started out on Twitter and I expected having to write up maybe 50 or so, but then it made the rounds. I don’t think I have 1200+ papers that I’d recommend reading, and even if I di…

203

The Glimmer VM: Boots Fast and Stays Fast

Great web applications boot up fast and stay silky smooth once they've started. In other contexts, applications can choose quick loading or responsiveness once they've loaded. Great games can get away with a long loading bar as long as they react instantly once the gamer gets going. In

210

Introduction to HTML Components

HTML Components (HTC), introduced in Internet Explorer 5.5, offers a powerful new way to author interactive Web pages. Using standard DHTML, JScript and CSS knowledge, you can define custom behaviors on elements using the “behavior” attribute. Let’s create a behavior for a simple kind of “image roll-over” effect. For…