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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,830 posts.

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7816

Zero-Overhead Tree Processing with the Visitor Pattern

The Visitor Pattern is one of the most mis-understood of the classic design patterns. While it has a reputation as a slightly roundabout technique for doing simple processing on simple trees, it is actually an advanced tool for a specific use case: flexible, streaming, zero-overhead processing of complex data…

7818

Lisp in Your Language

I'm a fan of Lisp programming languages, but there's an incredible conceptual elegance that struggles to materialise as readable elegance for many unfamiliar programmers. The underlying concepts are incredibly simple, but the learning curve can represent a disproportionate challenge.

7821

A little game to demonstrate timing attacks.

Lauren Ipsum is trying to get past Jane Hecate, a little old lady who holds the Book of Passwords. Jane is older and can't see well, so she has to spell out Lauren's guess letter by letter to check whether it's the right password. How can Lauren use this to her advantage? A story about computer science and other…

7824

Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines

Fizz Buzz is a counting game that has become oddly popular in the world of computer programming as a simple test of basic programming skills. The rules of the game are straightforward. Players say the numbers aloud in order beginning with one. Whenever a number is divisible by 3, they say 'Fizz' instead. If it is…