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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.

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10441

Stop making me memorize the borrow checker

I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely…

10446

Localisation is too hard for Gmail

/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and…

10448

Dividing front end from back end is an antipattern

We software developers have historically used the terms “frontend” and “backend” to describe work on client-side (e.g., browser) and server-side applications, respectively. This conceptual split has evolved into the creation of specialized developer roles for each, which is still the norm throughout the industry. In…

10454

Golang: Don't be afraid of makefiles

I’m using Golang for a while. During the development, I was used to repeatedly execute “go build”,“go test” manually. This was a bad habit on which I resign. It is not so painful if you use simple command without any args. But in case of more complex tasks, naturally, it is going to be a…

10469

Java Trap, 2010 Edition

As a member of the Apache Software Foundation , my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0) , BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions…