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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 498 posts.
We've launched user accounts at EveryBlock , and we faced the interesting problem of needing to cache entire pages except for the "You're logged in as [username] " bit at the top of the page. For example, the Chicago homepage takes a nontrivial amount of time to generate and doesn't change often -- which means we want…
The frame below is being served was being served by the Arc language web server running on a SheevaPlug plug computer. (I've replaced th...
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team …
A part of being a great programmer is having your personal code library. With a personal code library I mean a repository of code that you have an intimate knowledge of and that you can reuse quickly. If you are a C programmer, you don't want to reimplement linked lists, trees, various utility functions, macros and...
Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a p...
I was recently reading The Little Schemer , a very intersting book about how to think in Scheme. The book uses a unique question-response ...
Posted by Grzegorz Czajkowski, Systems Infrastructure TeamIf you squint the right way, you will notice that graphs are everywhere. For example, soc...
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems , "the library question" (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation - one…
Why is programming fun? An extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) book, The Mythical Man-Month. Fred Brooks coined the term "no silver bullet" that is famous in the field of computers.
We've had several customers lately stuck in the same boat: they exist in a conservative industry (insurance), they have a large set of fixed costs for their ...
Before he takes the first step, the programmer does not know that programming exists. He is aware of computers, but has never considered how they actually work. He feels the process of making a video game is somewhat akin to making a film, or perhaps writing a book. If someone were to ask him how that actually works…
djng is nearly two weeks old now, so it’s about time I wrote a bit about the project. I presented a keynote at EuroDjangoCon in Prague earlier this month entitled …
As part of the momentum surrounding the Ruby implementer’s summit , I have decided to take on a pet project to understand Ruby’s grammar better, with the goal of contributing to an implementation-independent specification of the grammar. Matz mentioned during his keynote how parse.y was one of the uglier parts of Ruby…
Clojure is the new hotness among people who think the JVM is an interesting platform for post-Java languages, and for people who think there’s still life in that ol’ Lisp beast, and for people who worry about concurrency and state in the context of the multicore future. Over the last few days I’ve been severely…
When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk.
I've gotten used to the snarky and cynical comments that people make on techcrunch and other tech blogs when there's a post about a startup that get's funded. It's a good thing that people debate and discuss these investments. Clearly not every venture investment that is made is a good one. In fact I've written […]
