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

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Neural network from scratch

In this edition of Napkin Math, we’ll invoke the spirit of the Napkin Math series to establish a mental model for how a neural network works by building one from scratch. In a future issue we will do napkin math on performance, as establishing the first-principle understanding is plenty of ground to cover for today!

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Why Everyone Eventually Hates or Leaves Maven

My colleague Martin Fowler recently posted a Bliki entry about InternalReprogrammability , lamenting the diminishing mind share of tools that allow extremely fine grained customizability, such as Emacs and Smalltalk. I agree whole heartedly with his sentiment; I covered some of the same ground in my Abstraction…

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Precursor

Precursor, our new continuous behavioral validation engine for bot management, offers visibility into how humans and bots actually interact across the full user journey. By turning session-level behavior into bot detection signals, it identifies advanced automation with higher precision — while reducing friction for…

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So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2008)

Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…

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JEP draft: Prepare to make final mean final

Issue warnings about uses of deep reflection to mutate final fields. These warnings aim to prepare developers for a future release that ensures integrity by default by restricting final field mutation, which will make Java programs safer and potentially faster. Application developers can avoid both current warnings…

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The switch: Python to Node.js

In my previous post , I glossed over our team switching from Python to Node.js. I kept it brief because the switch wasn’t the focus of the post, but since I believe I am being misunderstood, I will explain it in depth: