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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,274 posts.

2018
848

How to build an NPM worm

npm is a registry and package manager for JavaScript that ships as part of Node.js . It's used by tens of millions of people to install hundreds of thousands of packages billions of times every week.

851

Create a simple cross-platform desktop game with Go

A few months ago I fiddled around with writing Space Invaders using Go. I had a lot of fun writing it but the output only worked on iTerm2 because it used a specific feature of that terminal. In order to play the game you’d really have to download iTerm2 and run it on the command line. I thought it’d be fun to muck…

852

Visualizing SQL Plan Execution Time with FlameGraphs

Update: I wrote a follow-up article about adding Loop Counters and Row Counts to SQL Plan FlameGraphs. I also show some old examples of “Bookshelf Graph” visualizations there. Check it out after reading this post first. Introduction Brendan Gregg invented and popularized a way to profile & visualize program response…

857

A todo list for new ASP.NET Core projects

Here are a few things you can do to make your life easier when starting a new ASP.NET Core project, or reducing duplicate code without using boilerplate. Validate model state automatically The usual way would be to have this in almost every action in all controllers: if (!ModelState.IsValid) { // return bad request…

862

The Great Theorem Prover Showdown

Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…

866

Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014)

Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…

867

UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8

On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.

869

.NET Standard 2.1

Since we shipped .NET Standard 2.0 about a year ago, we’ve shipped two updates to .NET Core 2.1 and are about to release .NET Core 2.2. It’s time to update the standard to include some of the new concepts as well as a number of small improvements that make your life easier across the various implementations […]