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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,357 posts.

2019
574

Zig 0.5.0 Release Notes

Zig is a general-purpose programming language designed for robustness , optimality , and maintainability . Zig is aggressively pursuing its goal of overthrowing C as the de facto language for system programming. Zig intends to be so practical that people find themselves using it, because it "just works".

576

Graphical Introduction to Dynamic Programming

I’ve been helping a friend understand dynamic programming (DP for short), so I’ve been on the lookout for good resources. The topic is covered all across the web, but I found many of them focused on the code, and not enough on the beautiful visualizations that shed light into how DP works.

585

Using Fourier Transforms to Multiply Numbers

The purpose of this article is to show you step-by-step examples of how to use the Fourier transform algorithm to multiply two numbers. The primary advantage of using fourier transforms to multiply numbers is that you can use the asymptotically much faster 'Fast Fourier Transform algorithm', to achieve better…

590

Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)

Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…

592

Inside the C Standard Library

After diving into the C language through K&R, and then studying portability (see C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines ), my next challenge was to take a systematic look at the standard library. To do this I worked through P. J. Plauger’s book The Standard C Library (ISBN 978-0131315099) where he examines an…

596

Typestates in Rust (2018)

A long time ago, the Rust language was a language with typestate. Officially, typestates were dropped long before Rust 1.0. In this entry, I’ll get you in on the worst kept secret of the Rust community: Rust still has typestates.

599

80x25

Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…