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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,823 posts.

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4923

Google to Reimplement Curl in Libcrurl

Not the entire thing, just "a subset". It's not stated very clearly exactly what that subset is but the easy interface is mentioned in the Chrome bug about this project. What? The Chromium bug states that they will create a library of their own (named libcrurl) that will offer (parts of) the libcurl API and … Continue…

4927

CSS Modules

If you wanted to identify an inflection point in the recent development of CSS thinking, you’d probably pick Christopher Chedeau’s “CSS in JS” talk from NationJS in November, 2014. It was a watershed moment that set a bunch of different minds spiralling off in their own directions like particles after a high-energy…

4928

Firefox's Optimized Zip Format

This post is about minimizing amount of disk IO and CPU overhead when reading Zip files. I recently saw an article about a new format that was faster than zip. This is quite surprising as to my mind, zip is one of the most flexible and low-overhead formats I’ve encountered. Some googling showed me that over past 11…

4934

Python on Android

There are an increasing number of resources about different ways of running Python on Android. Kivy (and its subprojects) are commonly mentioned, as one of the most mature and popular ways to do so, but one thing that gets less attention is the details of what you can do with Python itself once it’s running on the…

4935

Power consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges

Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of…

4941

Racket Is an Acceptable Python

A little over a decade ago, there were some popular blogposts about whether Ruby was an acceptable Lisp or whether even Lisp was an acceptable Lisp . Peter Norvig was also writing at the time introducing Python to Lisp programmers . Lisp, those in the know knew, was the right thing to strive for, and yet seemed…

4945

Against Best Practices

I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…

4946

Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

February 10, 2020 4 minutes read The mythical book, Mythical man month quotes that no matter the programming language chosen, a professional developer will write on average 10 lines of code (LoC) day. After 14 years of full-time development on the tool NDepend I’d like to elaborate a bit here. Let’s start with the…