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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
I often work with clients who have large “data lakes” or big star schema style enterprise databases with fact and dimension tables as far as the eye can see. Invariably said clients end up with a substantial SQL codebase composed of hundreds of independent queries with lots of overlap between them. I want to be able…
Software rots. That is: Adapting mature software to new circumstances tends to take more time and effort than writing new software from scratch. Software people don't like to admit this, but open so…
When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment’s thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What’s less obvious is that they…
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
PostgreSQL trigger performance. Should we use tiggers at all? Find out how triggers perform in performance tests.
Are you arguing that undefined behaviour should not be a thing in, e.g., C? It sounds like you’re claiming that the fabled sufficiently smart compiler could take code in a C-like language with no UB, and emit something equivalent to what a C compiler would produce given equivalent input in C that correctly avoids UB…
I like to answer this frequent question by way of an example. An example of two companies. It goes something like this:
Sometimes I see unsourced, unclear, vaguely mystical claims about K being the fastest array language. It happens often enough that I'd like to write a long-form rebuttal to these, and a demand that the people who make these do more to justify them.
I built an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory.
90Phut TV là trang web không thể bỏ qua dành cho những tín đồ theo dõi bóng đá trực tuyến. Kênh đảm bảo mang đến chất lượng tường thuật mượt mà cùng nhiều tin
Learn practical optimization hacks, from data structures to built-in modules, that boost speed, reduce overhead, and keep your Python code clean.
You can mount code from your development machine into a container and save yourself tedious waiting times during development.
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced…
When writing concurrent Rust you will encounter Arc and Mutex types sooner or later. And although Mutex might already sound familiar as it's a concept known in many languages, chances are you haven't heard about Arc before Rust. What's more, you can't fully understand these concepts without tying them to the ownership…
When all you have is a hammer, everything in the world starts to look like a nail. Twenty five years of doing analysis and helping others do analysis has shown me that there are at least three diff…
You’ve probably heard that story about NPM community and LeftPad package, that broke thousands JavaScript projects worldwide. There was a nice follow-up article titled “Have We Forget How To Program” and one guy even created left-pad.io - Left-Pad As A Service web service. People got a lot of fun discussing this story.
I show how to use heterogeneous lists and traits to implement a type-safe printf in Rust. These mechanisms can ensure that two variadic argument lists share important properties, like the number of format string holes matches the number of printf arguments.
Learn what it means to conform to the Python typing spec, why it matters, and the conformance status of each type checker including Pyrefly, Ty, Pyright and Mypy.
Blog of Vincent Rolfs. Vincent is a freelance Software Engineer and IT-Consultant. He has more than ten years experience in developing complex applications on the web.
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
wxWidgets 3.1.5 release is now available on GitHub . You will find there archives with the library sources and documentation as well as binaries for the selected Windows compilers such as Microsoft Visual C++ , MinGW-w64 and TDM-GCC .
Unix is an alliance of loosely structured text files bound together and governed by scripts. Unix is the United Confederation of Strings:
One of our core beliefs at Heroku is that developers do their best work when the development process is as simple, elegant, and conducive to focus and flow
