Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,845 posts.
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)
Update 2014.12.17: Now that SSL is encouraged for everyone and doesn’t have performance concerns , this technique is now an anti-pattern . If the asset you need is available on SSL, then always use the https:// asset.
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
This is pretty important change, as it has the chance to cause performance issues in some cases.
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…
Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
Postmortem on the database outage of January 31 2017 with the lessons we learned.
Or, I want to use PBT, but I can never think of any properties to use
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
In most languages that support nested scopes, code can refer to or rebind (assign to) any name in the nearest enclosing scope. Currently, Python code can refer to a name in any enclosing scope, but it can only rebind names in two scopes: the local scope...
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
Encoding business logic in types
Introduction The Three Projections of Futamura are a sequence of applications of a programming technique called 'partial evaluation' or 'sp...
An Architect model describes how to solve the coding problem, and an Editor model translates that into file edits. This Architect/Editor approach produces SOTA benchmark results.
“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…
A recent paper suggested a new mathematical point of view on version control. I first found out about it from pijul, a new version control system (VCS) that ...
Over the last several years we’ve seen a whole range of ideas regarding the architecture of systems. These include:
Write most of your tests at a low level (unit tests) with a few broad-stack tests, eg via UI. UI tests tend to be fragile and slow.
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
What follows is the text of my presentation, Functional options for friendly APIs that I gave at dotGo this year. It has been edited slightly for readability.
Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments in, and are comfortable with the performance, security and stability of, industry-standard platforms like the JVM. While Java developers may envy the succinctness, flexibility and productivity of dynamic languages, they have concerns about running on…
A while back I did a series of postings on the topic of Common Misconceptions About Publishing.
This document describes the development and release schedule for Python 2.7.
Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge.
A small number of popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries account for a substantial portion of the network, battery, and time budgets of users of the contemporary Web. Many applications include these libraries even if they only use a small portion of the functionality they provide. Large improvements seem possible…
The computer itself ceases to exist.
