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Command Path Security in Go
How to decide if your programs are vulnerable to PATH problems, and what to do about it.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
15092
Simulating RAM in Clojure
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
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Twenty years, 1998 – 2018
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
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Stealing from Biologists to Compile Haskell Faster
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
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Why to use ‘python -m pip’
Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply `pip install ...` but now I can'
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Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math?
I recently attended the Heidelberg Laureate Forum , in which some older researchers--mainly Fields Medalists and Turing Award winners--talked to and with young researchers. The young researchers ranged from a few students just entering university to young faculty members, most being graduate students. They came from…
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I built a programming language using Claude Code
Over the course of four weeks in January and February, I built a new programming language using Claude Code. I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that. You can find the source code on GitHub , along with build instructions and example programs .
15101
Why You Can't Hire Great Perl Programmers
Programming is a skill in demand. Programming can get you a job. A guide to finding good programmers, Perl and otherwise.
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Why the developers who use Rust love it so much
Here’s why Rust gets so much love, straight from the Rustaceans themselves.
15103
Attempts to make Python fast
Posted on Hacker News there was an Implementation Plan for making CPython (the official Python implementation) faster. The author claims a 5x speedup is possible for the low cost of $2 million USD.
15104
If I could make my own GitHub
My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third wife has a skincare
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The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
A few weeks ago, we released a whole bunch of new features to Dropbox Plus, our paid plan for personal users. While we started as a storage company, we‘ve grown to be a hub to manage your digital life. About 150 people worked on this launch: engineers, product managers, designers, copywriters, and many more.
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The problem with "vibe coding"
An article from dylanbeattie.net
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How a Jenkins Job Broke our Jenkins UI
Artwork courtesy of the Jenkins project. At Slack we manage a sophisticated Jenkins infrastructure to continuously build and test our mobile apps before release. We have hundreds of jobs running in a variety of different environments. One day something very odd happened — our Jenkins UI stopped working although the…
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The slow march of progress in programming language tooling
Discover how programming language tooling has evolved over time and why newer languages like Go and Rust have gained popularity due to their compre...
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What is a programmable programming language? (2019)
When I was still researching this fabled obscure language called Lisp one thing people kept saying about it is that “Lisp is a programmable programming language”, but I could never figure out what they meant by that. It sounds like a smug buzzword or like a gimmick from an academic toy language. Lisp programmers have…
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Perl tutorials suck (and cause serious damage)
Before reading this entry, please note that this problem has been solved. You can now find fresh tutorials at the:
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SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)
A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…
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Your C is not standard C
this is an incomplete list of some incompatibilities between c as it's written in the standard and c as it exists in the real world for people who use gcc/clang + glibc/musl.
15113
Treating performance as a product: The technical story of Asana’s rewrite
Learn how the engineering team at Asana rewrote the Asana app to improve app performance and speed from an in-depth, technical perspective.
15114
Rust via its Core Values
I have a couple of ideas about learning programming languages. The first is that we do it wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You try learning a new language and can’t quite see how it all works. Why do I use this syntax here and some other syntax over here? We get frustrated by all the weird bits and go back to…
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Comparing Pythagorean triples in C++, D, and Rust
EDIT: As pointed out in the Rust reddit thread, the Rust version can be modified to run faster due to a suble difference between ..=z and ..(z+1). I’ve updated the measurements with rustc0 be…
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Why Do React Hooks Rely on Call Order?
Lessons learned from mixins, render props, HOCs, and classes.
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The best Postgres feature you're not using – CTEs aka WITH clauses
SQL by default isn’t typically friendly to dive into, and especially so if you’re reading someone else’s already created queries. For some reason most people throw out principles we follow in other languages such as commenting and composability just for SQL. I was recently reminded of a key feature in Postgres that…
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How bad is the Windows command line really?
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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C# 10 new feature CallerArgumentExpression
The CallerArgumentExpression has been discussed for years, it was supposed to a part of C# 8.0 but got delayed. Finally this month it is delivered along with C# 10 and .NET 6. …