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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,357 posts.

2019
94

Things I’ve learned in 20 years of programming

This year, I’ve become increasingly acquainted with the DEV platform. It’s a refreshingly positive oasis in the large sea of angry Reddit commenters and “well actually” connoisseurs that is the broader software world. One interesting facet of this community is that it seems pretty beginner-heavy. I regularly see posts…

105

Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try

I have been part of the Firefox Test Pilot team for several years. I had a long list of things I wanted to build. Some I didn’t personally want to build, but I thought they were interesting ideas. I didn’t get very far through this list at all, and now that Test Pilot is being retired I am unlikely to get to them in…

112

A better zip bomb

This article shows how to construct a non-recursive zip bomb that achieves a high compression ratio by overlapping files inside the zip container. "Non-recursive" means that it does not rely on a decompressor's recursively unpacking zip files nested within zip files: it expands fully after a single round of…

115

Think in Math, Write in Code

Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…

118

Rules for Autocomplete

Autocompleting text with known values seems like an easy problem to solve, but so so so many UIs get it wrong. I see this frequently enough that, rather than complain about them individually, I though I’d just write down the set of rules they often break.