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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,845 posts.
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
This technical deep-dive explains how V8 handles JavaScript properties behind the scenes.
An introduction to the Go's defer, panic, and recover control flow mechanisms.
Today we’ll be looking at how to connect the protocols powering Mastodon in the simplest way possible to enter the federated network. We will use static files, standard command-line tools, and some simple Ruby scripting, although the functionality should be easily adaptable to other programming languages. First…
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
Use urandom. That is the whole answer. Why the entropy-depletion story is a myth, and why userspace CSPRNGs are behind most of the last decade's randomness disasters.
May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who…
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin ), Google Code would no longer host the project.
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
The first three newsgroups created inside Netscape (then Mosaic Communications ), when our news server went online the first time, were mcom.general, mcom.humour, and mcom.bad-attitude.
Announcing the Go font family, by Bigelow & Holmes.
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…
The typestate pattern is an API design pattern that encodes information about an object’s run-time state in its compile-time type . In particular, an API using the typestate pattern will have:
This PEP suggests to support non-ASCII letters (such as accented characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Kanji, etc.) in Python identifiers.
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary , usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the…
When dealing with an extensive infrastructure and many team members, managing SSH keys for authentication can become unwieldy. However, SSH can utilize cert…
Protobuf, the binary format crafted by Google, surpasses JSON performance even on JavaScript environments like Node.js/V8 and web browser...
Due to a variety of technical and organizational issues, we will be sunsetting React Native and putting all of our efforts into making…
For many years, Windows Notepad only supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters - Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF).
Effective Emacs Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ 10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs Emacs is the world's best text editor. It's not just the best for editing program source; it's the best for any kind of text-editing. Mastering Emacs will make you more effective at writing and
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
This PEP is a tutorial for the pattern matching introduced by PEP 634.
Experience zero data sprawl with EDB Postgres AI. Capable of handling 30B+ trades a day and managing 50 TB.
FOUT is what I’m calling the flash of unstyled text that you get while using @font-face in Firefox and Opera.
Raise your hand if you know how to validate an email address. For those of you with your hand in the air, put it down quickly before someone sees you. It’s an odd sight to see someone sitting alone at the keyboard raising his or her hand. I was speaking metaphorically.
Remember that Stack Overflow thing we’ve been working on? Some commenters on a recent Hacker News article questioned the pricing of Stack Exchange – essentially, a hosted Stack Overflow: Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an open source alternative? it looks like something…
Explore interactive Qt demos that showcase the power of Qt’s cross-platform tools—ideal for developers seeking real-world applications to boost their projects.
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
