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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 373 posts.
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TDD: tastes better without the T?
Writing tests turned me off the whole enterprise so much that eventually I decided I’d just write without them. And nothing awful happened! In fact, it was as much a breath of fresh air as I&…
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Steve Jobs just ruined the iPhone for Clojure
Recently Apple released new terms of service with their iPhone OS. By now most of you have seen the following section. I've copied this f...
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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Stuck in Code
An ex colleague let's call him.. uhh .. Vivek, who was my peer at MegaCorp many years ago who is presently VP of R&D at [very well known c...
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A crazy Ruby quine: a spinning globe.
RubyConf に参加するためには、やっぱり 山手 quine みたいに東京限定ネタは通じにくいですよね。これからは Quine もグローバルでないといけないと感じました。 でも世界的に有名な環状線とか知らないので、世界的に有名な回るものを書いてみました。 v=0000;eval$s=%q~d=%!^Lcf<LK8, _@7gj*LJ=c5nM)Tp1g0%Xv.,S[<>YoP 4ZojjV)O>qIH1/n[|2yE[>:ieC "%.#% :::##" 97N-A&Kj_K_><wS5rtWk@*a+Y5 yH?b[F^e7C/56j|pmRe+:)B "##% ::#########…
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Proving P!=NP: "...Ryan has taken the first real baby step in decades."
On October 8th, when in my graduate complexity course as we discussed the 1987 Razborov-Smolensky result that one can't compute the Mod p b...
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Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business
There is a reason why JSON is becoming very popular as a data exchange format (more important than it being less verbose than XML): programmers are sick of writing parsers! But “wait”, …
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How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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Your Version Control and Build Systems Don't Scale
Let's spend a minute and talk about the performance of a tool you use every day: your build system. For this purpose, they're all the same, so let's assume you use GNU Make. For a no-op build, what is Make's running time? You know, that O(N) stuff.
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Is Good Code Impossible?
I'm a Staff iOS Developer living in Denver, Colorado, who's been building mobile apps for 17 years!
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Why C Is Not Assembly
In response to a previous article a poster in some forum called me an idiot and said "everybody knows that C is a portable assembly languag...
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The Building Blocks of Ruby
When showing off cool features of Ruby to the uninitiated (or to a language sparring partner [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1099305/why-is-ruby-more-suitable-for-rails-than-python/1099367] ), the excited Rubyist often shows off Ruby's "powerful block syntax". Unfortunately, the Rubyist uses "powerful block…
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In praise of git’s index
I still run into people lambasting Git for the concept of the index from time to time. It seems strange and superfluous to users of other VCS s – like a speed bump that serves no purpose. Why not just commit the changes in the working copy? This perception is understandable; when I first heard of Git, back as a…
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How a Vim user converts to Emacs
For many years I thought that the heretics of the Emacs clan [1] were clearly insane – the followers of Vim were obviously following the True Path. And then I was snared by the dark side. My …
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Lisp interpreter in 90 lines of C++
I've enjoyed reading Peter Norvig's recent articles on Lisp. He implements a Scheme interpreter in 90 lines of Python in the first , and dev...
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Mono 2.8 has been released
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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Gave up a day job Now what? - Income report #3
So here is my another monthly income report. At the beginning I would like to thank to all my loyal readers that are visiting my site (leave a comment on this post with a short HI if you want me to…
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Why writing software is not like engineering
While my talent lies in software, my graduate studies were in computer engineering (designing and building digital computers). One observation always struck me: computer engineering seemed more straightforward than computer science (building software). There are a set of engineering design rules to follow and…