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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,844 posts.
This essay discusses how to separate JavaScript domain properties from object behaviour, without prototypes . This is deliberate. By examining four basic ways to have one object define the behaviour of other objects, we gain insight into what we’re trying to accomplish at a very basic level.
Pansophical reader, with your bafflingly good mobile OCaml project, I’m ready at last to release an OCaml compiler for iOS 7. It works for all my projects, and I hope it works for yours.
Google has long believed that users should be able to export their data and use it with whichever service they choose. For years, the Gmail ...
This post is the first in a three-part series about my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this first post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I'll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we've…
In an earlier post, I showed how to implement the “world’s simplest lock-free hash table” in C++. It was so simple that you couldn’t even delete entries or …
Of all the programming styles I have learned, dynamic programming is perhaps the most beautiful. It can take problems that, at first glance, look ugly and intractable, and solve the problem with clean, concise code. Where a simplistic algorithm might accomplish something by brute force, dynamic programming steps back…
UPDATE Feb 17, 2023: David Thompson presented a walk-trough about how he implemented the Networked Garden game at DecentSocial 2023
Hello. A lot of things happened in March, like pycon . I was also busy doing other things (pictured), so apologies for the late numpy statu...
A collection of examples of how to use Common Lisp
Discover how Broadway can help you create highly concurrent data processing pipelines in your Elixir app.
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
“There’s just no nice way to say this: Anyone who can’t make a syndication feed that’s well-formed XML is an incompetent fool.——Maybe this is unkind and elitist of me, but I think that anyone who either can’t or won’t implement these measures is, as noted above, a bozo.” – Tim Bray , co-editor of the XML 1.0…
Almost every week I accidentally get into this logging argument. Here’s the problem: people tend to log different things and call it a best-practice. And I a...
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
Abstract: Machine and language models of computation differ so greatly in the computational complexity properties of their representation that they form two distinct classes that cannot be directly…
Garbage collectors are expected to be invisible: if programmers (or even users) notice them, something is wrong. Usually, such problems are are performance problems, but there could be correctness issues as well. This makes implementing them a bit scary.
Previously ruby used to support only Rvalue to be assigned to Lvalue. Now, it adds support for Rightward assignment
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
I have a favourite joke when teaching new and delete in C++. Alas, I believe that attendees are now less likely to have seen the show it references. Therefore, I present it here for your enjoyment (or not).
You might find the title a little bit odd. Hold your thought for a moment and hear me out. I'm a big believer that in technology, and life, something that…
If your app has just ruined my day, I need help, not humour.
These statements can be hard to argue against, especially if they come from someone who is more experienced than you. A lot of the trouble is that they are not wrong – well, they’re not completely wrong.
