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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,828 posts.

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Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…

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Python: Just Write SQL

I have been writing a lot more Go this past year. For those not familiar, Go favours a non-ORM, non-query-builder approach to interacting with databases. This comes naturally due to the sql package : A common interface to be used alongside database drivers. It’s very common to see actual SQL in Go, even in large…

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SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow

I've been sitting on publishing these notes for a while, because I don't want to diminish the work of the talented people that engineered SwiftUI and plowed through years of AppKit and UIKit code to get to this state. But I'd like to draw attention to some performance limitations, in the hope that a SwiftUI engineer…

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Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry

Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages…

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Python Asyncio

Asynchronous programming is a popular programming paradigm that allows a large number of lightweight tasks to run concurrently with very little memory overhead, compared to threads.

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Considering C99 for Curl

tldr: we stick to C89 for now. The curl project builds on foundations that started in late 1996 with the tool named httpget. ANSI C became known as C89 In 1996 there were not too many good alternatives for making a small and efficient command line tool for doing Internet transfers. I am not saying … Continue reading…

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.NET Framework 4.6.2

Updated (4/2017): See .NET Framework Releases for newer releases. Today we are excited to announce the availability of the .NET Framework 4.6.2! Many of the changes are based on your feedback, including those submitted on UserVoice and Connect. Thanks for your continued help and engagement! The release is packed with…

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The Homely Mutt

Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you're not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.