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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 537 posts.
Automatic differentiation is a well-studied technique for computing exact numeric derivatives. Dan Piponi has a great introduction on the subject , but to give you an overview, the idea is that you introduce an algebraic symbol such that but . Formulas involving are called dual numbers (e.g., , ) in much the same way…
Intrigued by the Go programming language.
I’ve been programming for quite some time and have explored a variety of programming paradigms along the way. From time to time people will ask 1 which is better: functional programming or object-oriented programming. Having done both extensively in my time I can exclaim a resounding: it depends .
In the past I have presented simplified descriptions of D3 ’s selections, providing only enough detail to get started. This article takes a more comprehensive approach; rather than saying how to use selections , I will explain how selections are implemented . This may take longer to read, but it should dispel any…
The Rails community has had a few high-profile security issues this week. They are well-summarized, with an alarming list of what follow-ons to expect, by Patrick McKenzie: What the Rails Security Issue Means for Your Startup.
In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…
This post was too inflammatory and abusive in nature, and I regret writing it. It did exist, and you can probably can find it using the web archive. UI is hard.
Simple guide to extending your browser with Chrome extensions
A webserver and reverse proxy solution brought to you by linuxserver.io with php support and a built-in Certbot client.
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
As you hopefully have heard, we at scikit-learn are doing a user survey (which is still open by the way). One of the requests there was t...
At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to multiple gigabytes. It was easy enough…
Is it reasonable to expect mere mortals to have mastery over every facet of the development stack? Probably not, but Facebook can ask for it. I was told at OSCON by a Facebook employee that they only hire 'Full Stack' developers. Well, what does that mean? To me, a Full Stack Developer is someone with
A trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk -returning functions ( continuation-passing style ). A single trampoline is sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampolining…
Dear (insert name here), I heard you enjoy a certain programming language named Python. Programming is a wonderful activity. I am a little...
More than a year passed since I had started to publish a series of interviews with Lisp hackers . It was a great project, but I'm going to...
Just stop, y’all. It’s a waste of your time and your effort. Put down your Google search for an email regular expression, take a step back, and breathe.
Among the many proposed solutions, one of them strikes me as particularly clean: "asynchronous wait" or "wait and defer". iced-coffee-script had this a while ago. Kal just debuted with an identical solution, only differing in syntax. Supposedly LiveScript supports this with "backcalls" .
Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
