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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,013 posts.

2014
541

Talking about “types”

My essay “In Search of Types” attempts to be a dispassionate review of some of the different concepts, purposes and attitudes surrounding the word “type” in programming. I imagine that my passions are still rather thinly veiled in places. But in this post I'm going to come out with a more unabashedly ranty take…

545

Careful with that Buffer

Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988 (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part numbers, I did a double take when I realized that a file with random e-mail fragments was, in…

550

Generation JavaScript

I’ll start by saying that this is not a rant, but rather a cry of despair that I’m repeating and that slowly - but steadily - seems to come to consciousness in our industry, like this one. The phenomenon I’m about to describe is not only limited to the Javascript community either, that community seems a lot more…

552

Predicting the next Math.random() in Java

A while back a friend of mine hosted a programming competition where you were given 9 random numbers one at a time and you had to guess the rank (the sorted position amongst the 9) of each as they are coming in. The goal was to submit a strategy in Java that will maximize the number of these games won. The best…

556

Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go

Supervisor trees are one of the core ingredients in Erlang's reliability and let it crash philosophy . A well-structured Erlang program is broken into multiple independent pieces that communicate via messages, and when a piece crashes, the supervisor of that piece automatically restarts it.

559

Intrusive lists in Doom 3

Doom 3 was released in 2004, which I can't believe was a decade ago. Great game, atmospheric and scary, and a worthy successor of the first two games in the series. Several years after the initial release, in 2011, Doom 3's source code was published on Github. It can be fun to poke around the repository to learn how…

566

What is a Web Framework?

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568

Why threads can't fork

There is an interesting thread on the Go issue tracker about daemonizing processes. Most of the thread is not about daemonizing processes though, but more about why Go has no Fork() function which you can call directly in your code. The first time I read through it I was wondering and saying to myself: “Yeah, why is…