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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 403 posts.
I just installed a “hello world” Chrome extension from this Chrome Extension tutorial page. When you surf to www.google.com, the Google logo is replaced with a Lolcat: Here’s how …
Busy Beaver puts another one on the Turing Machine's tape (image from the book The New Turing Omnibus). The busy beaver problem is a fun theoretical computer science problem. Intuitively, the problem is to find the smallest program that outputs as many data as possible and eventually halts. More formally it goes…
Web Workers are, undoubtedly, the coolest new feature to arrive in the latest version of web browsers. Web Workers allow you to run JavaScript in parallel on a web page, without blocking the user interface.
Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.
TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an…
Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive . where he writes: "Given the rapid advance ...
I recently found a security flaw in the Google Keyczar crypto library. The impact was that an attacker could forge signatures for data that was “signed” with the SHA-1 HMAC algorithm (t…
Finishing up a whirlwind tour of the US West coast (QCon SF, Erlang Factory Lite LA, and a Cognitive Modeling workshop in Scottsdale), I am now waiting for a delayed BA flight at the Phoenix airport. Although I’ve spent as many days flying as I have on US soil, it’s been a great trip.
Here’s real news: Alex Osborne of National Library of Australia , also known as @atosborne , whom I first met on #clojure , took the Wide Finder bit between his teeth and has posted a remarkable implementation story: Widefinder 2 with Clojure . Um, 8m4.663s! If you care about any aspect of this stuff you really ought…
Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
Remember when you first tried to parse text?
I’ve been interviewing candidates for developer positions for over a decade now. In my early years I was very much hit and miss in terms of...
Good things sometimes happen to the open source community. Since Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, a bunch of technologies were released to the wild, including, most notably, a Tornado web server written in Python. The Tornado is touted as a a scalable, non-blocking web server and web…
[EDIT: Minor edits to fix HTML formatting, style, corrected footnote credit, and code indentation the editor kills on every edit.] While l...
I have extended my xgoogle library with a Python module for Google Translate. The new module is called "xgoogle.translate" and it implements two classes - "Translator" and "LanguageDetector". The "Translator" class can be used to translate text. It provides a function called "translate" that takes three arguments -...
