Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,845 posts.
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
The scrypt key derivation function and encryption utility
This PEP introduces generator expressions as a high performance, memory efficient generalization of list comprehensions PEP 202 and generators PEP 255.
In this blog post, I will present one of the most interesting additions to the community 2019 version of SPARK: pointer support. One of the core…
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …
The Backend Infrastructure team at Discord was hard at work improving the scalability and performance of our core real-time communications infrastructure.
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
Please see our Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3 release notes for more of our latest features. Update: Windows 10 SDK version 2104 has been
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
A more permanent version of this article is stored at GitHub . Please link to that rather than to here. If you hadn't guessed, this is about...
This PEP describes an addition to the standard library called Data Classes. Although they use a very different mechanism, Data Classes can be thought of as “mutable namedtuples with defaults”. Because Data Classes use normal class definition syntax, y...
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
There are not a lot of very strong empirical results in the field of programming languages . This is probably because there’s a huge amount of variables to control for, and most of the subjects available to researchers are CS undergraduates. However, I have recently found a result replicated across numerous codebases…
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
People often choose Redux before they need it. “What if our app doesn’t scale without it?” Later, developers frown at the indirection Redux…
This PEP outlines the behavior of Python scripts when the python command is invoked. Depending on a distribution or system configuration, python may or may not be installed. If python is installed its target interpreter may refer to python2 or python3. ...
This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution. Please see the companion informational PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
Visit the post for more.
This is a proposal for creating a way to assign to variables within an expression using the notation NAME := expr.
While the Common Lisp standard does not require implementations to eliminate tail calls, some do—thereby allowing a more functional programming style. Especially in the prototyping phase, it can be useful to know where this functional style can be employed and where it's likely to cause stack overflow. Since I…
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.
