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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,304 posts.

2016
635

Having fun abusing the C language

I was looking through the book Expert C Programming again when I came upon their “light relief” section on The International Obfuscated C Code Competition . It’s a contest to write the most obscure code. That the language C has a competition where you write confusing code in it probably says something about the…

644

A Technical Perspective on the Apple iPhone Case

The legal dispute between Apple and the FBI might prove pivotal in the long-running battle to protect users' privacy and right to use uncompromised encryption. The case has captured the public imagination. Of course, EFF supports Apple's efforts to protect its users. The case is complicated...

646

Vulkan in 30 minutes

I've written this post with a specific target audience in mind, namely those who have a good grounding in existing APIs (e.g. D3D11 and GL) and understand the concepts of multithreading, staging resources, synchronisation and so on but want to know specifically how they are implemented in Vulkan. So we end up with a…

651

Eve: My Concerns

Eve is a new programming language. Maybe. Or, a development environment. More accurately, perhaps, it’s a tool to think. If you have an hour to spare, this is a great video to watch from Chris Granger:

655

New string formatting in Python

For a language that claims to focus on one right way to handle most situations, string formatting in Python is quite a buffet and it’s getting more diverse by the year. Starting with Python 3.6 we now have three ways to format strings (outside of simple concatinating things or using string.Template ):

659

How Quaternions encode rotations: derivation and sample code

In the post on matrices in Codea I mentionned that an affine transformation (things like rotation, scaling, translation) ℝ 3 → ℝ 3 could be specified by giving four vectors. In this post I want to examine that a little more closely for the special case of a rotation. That is to say: how can I encode a rotation in ℝ 3…