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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.

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17409

Quake 3 Source Code Review

Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…

17411

How mitmproxy works

I started work on mitmproxy because I was frustrated with the available interception tools. I had a long list of minor complaints - they were insufficiently flexible, not programmable enough, mostly written in Java (a language I don't enjoy), and so forth. My most serious problem, though, was opacity. The best tools…

17418

A catalog of side effects

Optimizing compilers like to keep track of each IR instruction’s effects. An instruction’s effects vary wildly from having no effects at all, to writing a specific variable, to completely unknown (writing all state).

17421

The Reasoned Lisper

Bridging Discrete and Continuous Logic in Automated Reasoning Systems In this article we will explore the connection between Functional Programming and reasoning. Functional Programming is often ad…

17428

I can't believe I'm praising Tcl (2008)

So the other day I both defined Tcl procedures all by myself and used them interactively, and I liked it, to the point where it felt like some kind of local optimum. This entry is an attempt to cope with the trauma of liking Tcl, by means of rationalizing it. I'll first tell the story of my fascinating adventures, and…

17430

Queues should be empty

I’ve been writing a pubsub listener for work recently and had this silly “shower thought”: the ideal queue should be empty. Why? If the queue is not empty, it means that whatever job is consuming from the queue is not keeping up with messages coming into it. Ok, then if queues are supposed to be empty, then what are…