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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…
Introduction Recently, I watched a video by YouTuber ThePrimeTime which details a dev’s frustrations with business culture. Prime is an ex-entrepreneur who currently works in software development at Netflix. His views in this video have been criticised for being jaded by FAANG business cultures he has worked in. I…
Posted by Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, and Bryan Perozzi, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Re...
Proper support for sum types or tagged unions have become table stakes for systems programming languages. However, they can incur a lot of memory fragmentation that's not trivial to avoid without good support for metaprogramming. This post goes into Zig's powerful comptime feature, and how it allows some radical…
“When will there be a Rust IDE?” Update: RustRover is now generally available, with free non-commercial use and commercial licensing options. Learn more about the RustRover release. We get this
The latest Go release, version 1.21, arrives six months after Go 1.20 . Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility ; in fact, Go 1.21 improves upon that promise . We expect almost all Go programs to continue…
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
[…] Embedded in Academia : Why Take a Compiler Course? – Seconded, or whatever – my compiler course was briefer than I'd have liked but many of my peers didn't take it and I spent ages explaining what I thought where simple concepts to them when working on group projects and the like. […]
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, we started to get some interesting functionality with the ability to resolve addresses to names in a module. This was the last functionality missing before we could implement breakpoints! This part adds the ability for DbgRs to set…
On January 8, 2024, GitHub will remove support for Subversion.
Gautham's Blog
Today Microsoft announced the availability of .NET 8, the latest version of one of the world’s leading programming languages and development platforms.
The latest Go release, version 1.20, arrives six months after Go 1.19 . Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility . We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.
A visual, interactive introduction to hash functions.
Well that blew up. It was supposed to be just a silly off-the-cuff comment about how some bugs are very tedious to bisect. To answer a few questions people had, here’s what actually happened.…
We often romanticize the notion of programming, presenting it as an abstract form of art, a science, or even a form of magic. The truth, however, is much mor...
Highlights: CloudGuard Spectral detected malicious extensions on the VSCode marketplace Users installing these extensions were enabling attackers to steal %
For the past few years I’ve been the most senior developer on my teams in Atlassian, in both position (Principal Engineer) and time (almost 9 years ) - this means I usually take on the responsibility of managing our software architecture.
An exciting proposal is expected to land in Go 1.22 - enhancing the pattern-matching capabilities of the default HTTP serving multiplexer in the net/http package.
I’m excited to share a 3 state, 3 symbol Turing Machine that cannot be proven to halt or not (when starting on a blank tape) without solving a Collatz-like problem. Therefore, solving the \(BB(3, 3)\) problem is at least as hard as solving this Collatz-like problem, a class of problem for which Paul Erdős famously…
The most important coding habits are those that enable us to enjoy this craft for years to come. Here are tips for programming without pain.
When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…
Instagram's guiding principles and tech stack explained simply
Which is better for code reviews, a unified diff or a split diff?
I typically start new front-end prototypes with a single HTML file that I view using a file:// URL. I enjoy this practice of incrementally growing my projects, so I’ll keep working in that single file for as long as I can. Once it becomes unwieldy, I’ll split out the CSS and JavaScript into dedicated files. Then when…
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A practical comparison of build and test speed between C++ and Rust.
