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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,835 posts.

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12724

Cron best practices

The time-based job scheduler cron(8) has been around since Version 7 Unix, and its crontab(5) syntax is familiar even for people who don’t do much Unix system administration. It’s standardised , reasonably flexible, simple to configure, and works reliably, and so it’s trusted by both system packages and users to…

12725

Rails and Merb Merge

Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation. Before talking tech, and even going into the details of the announcement, I want

12727

Why WinQuake exists and how it works

When I took a look at the history of Quake binaries, they all made sense to me. quake.exe was the original release, able to run on DOS and Windows 95. Then came vquake.exe to support the hardware accelerated chip Vérité 1000. Later, glquake.exe generalized hardware acceleration to any vendor providing OpenGL drivers…

12728

Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance

In one part of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is neither about Zen nor motorcycle maintenance, there are two motorcycles and two riders. John Sutherland is a romanticist who appreciates the external qualities of his motorcycle: its aesthetics, and its use as a vehicle. The narrator is a…

12733

Pathfinding

Hello! I've recently been working on the pathfinding for NPCs in my game, which is something I've been looking forward to for a while now since it's a nice chunky problem to solve. I thought I'd write...

12735

Zig 0.3.0 Released

Zig is an open-source programming language designed for robustness , optimality , and clarity . Zig is aggressively pursuing its goal of overthrowing C as the de facto language for system programming. Zig intends to be so practical that people find themselves using it even if they dislike it.

12736

Introduction to monads in JavaScript

I know, I know, the world does not need yet another introduction to monads (or yet another article complaining that world does not need yet another introduction to monads). So you’ll be glad to know this isn’t one of those, in the sense that it’s not new. I thought I’d write it because, first, monads are worth knowing…

12737

GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime

The Wasm GC and exceptions proposals are both enabled by default in today’sWasmtime 47 release! We are excited to help bring more languages to WebAssemblyand everywhere that Wasmtime runs. Getting to this point involved large Wasmtimecha...

12741

Path Tracing Quake in Blender

This week twenty-five years ago, Quake broke new ground in game engine realism. It was one of the first commercial games to have fully texture mapped 3D scenes rendered in real-time, with pre-computed lightmaps adding an extra layer of atmosphere.

12742

Lessons learned from profiling an algorithm in Rust

Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ . The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet another RiiR). But I found that my implementation is much slower than the original one. Here is how I improve…

12746

A Rebuttal for Python 3

Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu

12748

Programming Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi

How to combine Minecraft and the Wolfram Language, both standard on Raspberry Pi, to make interesting structures, add character capabilities or render your own output in 3D. Clear instructions on installation, using the MinecraftLink library, building, reacting to events.