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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 679 posts.

2011
308

Surprises from numerical linear algebra (2010)

Here are ten things about numerical linear algebra that you may find surprising if you're not familiar with the field. Numerical linear algebra applies very advanced mathematics to solve problems that can be stated with high school mathematics. Practical applications often require solving enormous systems of…

316

Treatise on Font Rasterisation

Font rasterisation is, in the author’s opinion, one of the most interesting fields of computer science. If music is the subjective application of physics, then font rasterisation is almost certainly the subjective application of computer science. The purpose of this article is threefold: firstly, to provide an…

320

Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know

321

Django Advice

For the past year and a half or so I've been working full-time at Dumbwaiter Design doing Django development. I've picked up a bunch of useful tricks along the way that help me work, and I figured I'd share them.

324

Speeding up Rails startup time

In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative.

326

Why We Stick With PHP (and don't move to Ruby or Python)

I often get asked by potential employees and clients, why we do PHP and mostly PHP only. A valid question, of course and my first answer usually is (besides the “historical reasons” one), that nowadays all those server side (scripting) languages are mainly the glue layer between the front-end (the browser part) and…