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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,508 posts.
A recent tweet by a friend of mine noted how the public interest in the Scala programming language seems to have plateaued or waned, which matches my feeling of the latest trends and zeitgeist. This blog post will go into why I think that has happened, where Scala stands now, and what the future holds for the Scala…
What does matrix multiplication mean? Here's a few common intuitions: This is useful when first learning about vectors: vectors go in, new ones come out.…
Now available, code scanning is a developer-first, GitHub-native approach to easily find security vulnerabilities before they reach production.
Discover and get inspired, explore through hundreds of tech products.
NetNewsWire is fast because performance is one of our core values. Being fast is part of the very definition of the app.
Why you should escape output correctly, but generally not sanitize user input.
Every now and then I like to think about topics that don't directly relate to my daily work. One of those topics has been parsers: back in January I wrote about byte-ordered stream parsing and how I think we can improve streaming parsing in Rust with a small set of API additions.
Think about the most complex frontends you’ve used. Frontends that made you wonder — “how did they create this”?
Rust has been Stack Overflow's most loved language for four years in a row, indicating that many of those who have had the opportunity to use Rust have fallen in love with it. However, the roughly 97% of survey respondents who haven't used Rust may wonder, "What's the deal with Rust?"
In the world of High-Frequency Trading, automated applications process hundreds of millions of market signals every day and send back…
Here's an insider's look at Firefox's code quality toolchain that's been designed to manage the ongoing development and monthly releases of our desktop browser. This post explores the architecture, challenges, ...
I love mental models. They’re crucial to understanding complex systems, allowing us to intuitively grasp and solve complex problems.
A guide to the fundamental concepts that underlie message queues, and how they apply to popular queueing systems available today.
By David Henry & Mel Yahya
Both QBE and LLVM are compiler backends using an SSA representation. This document will explain why LLVM does not make QBE a redundant project. Obviously, everything following is biased, because written by me.
JSON is everywhere you look these days. The `jq` tool makes it easy to slice, dice, and transform JSON from the command line. It can be hard to map the official manual to real-world applications, so let's look at some practical examples of `jq` and its cousins that handle YAML & HTML!
The famous fast inverse square root is some mysterious code not written by programming legend John Carmack to calculate a fast approximation of $1/\sqrt{x}$:
There’s a proposal to add Software Transactional Memory , or STM , to the Ruby programming language. This is part of a wider effort to add better support for concurrency and parallelism in Ruby, and in particular the idea of ractors . A concept has been proposed and implemented by Koichi Sasada.
Understanding the fundamental building blocks of Bitcoin can be daunting for some developers. The purpose of this guide is to explain through simple pieces of code, how Bitcoin works.
The path to an offline SaaS model
OOP, for all its excesses, was a big step forward in software engineering. The way to move past OOP is to replace it with another discipline, not anarchy.
My book, Evidence-based software engineering , is now available; the pdf can be downloaded here , here and here , plus all the code+data . Report any issues here . I’m investigating the possibility of a printed version. Mobile friendly pdf (layout shaky in places).
Rotate a cube by 90 degrees around the \(x\)-axis, then rotate it by 90 degrees around the \(z\)-axis. This is equivalent to a single rotation. What is the axis and angle of this single rotation?
“The greatest force in legacy databases is inertia,” a widely regarded industry analyst once told me. Not superior functionality. Not better performance. Not lower cost. None of the above. Just inertia. Developers might say they prefer to run PostgreSQL to proprietary alternatives (and they do), but enterprises have…
