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Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
Can Stripe actually use Stripe Billing to manage subscriptions and invoice its customers? We conducted the experiment.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,551 posts.
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Why software engineers like woodworking
The smell of fresh pine sawdust filled the air, with more floating up as I sanded the last rough corner of the stool. My toddler was happily sanding her own block off to the side.
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Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform
Just over two years ago I left a role at a London based startup where I lead development of a large, React based e-commerce frontend to join Google to work on Chrome DevTools. My initial focus was to introduce Web Components as the new fundamental building block of all new DevTools features and UI. With the recently…
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Coping with Copilot
CS educators: AI-based developer tools are gunning for your assignments. Resistance is futile GitHub’s AI-based Copilot tool went public this summer. It’s an amazing tool for software developers. B…
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Cognitive loads in programming
This long post presents programming in a different light than what is commonly considered. We will look at cognitive aspects of interacting with code.
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Accounting for Developers, Part II
In this second post of our three-part series, we build a ledger for a Venmo clone by applying the accounting principles we learned in Part I.
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Seven sins of numerical linear algebra
In numerical linear algebra we are concerned with solving linear algebra problems accurately and efficiently and understanding the sensitivity of the problems to perturbations. We describe seven si…
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Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes
Update: You can play an updated version online here in the binjgb Game Boy emulator. This is the version with the frequency-based answer l...
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TypeScript is terrible for library developers
We spend a disproportionate amount of time on types
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State of CSS
Web styling features of today and tomorrow, as seen at Google IO 2022, plus some extras.
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How Dwarf Fortress is built
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
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Roguelike Tutorial in Rust (2019)
This tutorial is free and open source, and all code uses the MIT license - so you are free to do with it as you like. My hope is that you will enjoy the tutorial, and make great games!
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What does an idle CPU do? (2014)
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
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How to drive away your best engineers
Tenures are at an all-time low in the software industry.
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Why We Use Julia, 10 Years Later
10 years ago today, we published 'Why we Created Julia' ...
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Jo – a shell command to create JSON (2016)
I got tired of attempting to get shell scripts to produce valid JSON. You’ve likely seen something like this before: echo '{
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Senior engineers are living in the future
I magine for a moment that, by some quirk of the universe, you are sharing your workspace with a time traveller. Specifically, yourself from 1 year in the future. How will you react to your new co-worker? 1 [ 1 If you find this exercise difficult, try instead imagining how your past self of a year ago would react to…
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Why does gRPC insist on trailers?
gRPC comes up occasionally on the Orange Site , often with a redress of grievences in the comment section. One of the major complaints people have with gRPC is that it requires HTTP trailers. This one misstep has caused so much heartache and trouble, I think it probably is the reason gRPC failed to achieve its goal…
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Architecture Notes: Datasette
Simon is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django web framework. Formerly he was a JSK journalism fellow at Stanford, and prior to that an Engineering Director at Eventbrite.
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I have complicated feelings about TDD
They're not all good and not all bad
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LogJ4 Security Inquiry – Response Required
On Friday January 21, 2022 I received this email. I tweeted about it and it took off like crazy. The email comes from a fortune-500 multi-billion dollar company that apparently might be using a product that contains my code, or maybe they have customers who do. Who knows? My guess is that they do this … Continue…
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Scaling our spreadsheet engine from thousands to billions of cells
Causal has joined Lucanet to deliver Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A) as part of the Lucanet CFO Solution Platform. Make smarter planning decisions with unified real-time insights across financial and operational planning.
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Tips for a Healthier Postgres Database
Craig's year end wrap-up of 5 things you can do for a healthier Postgres database next year.
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What's New in Python 3.11?
Latest features the newest Python release has to offer, that you should know about - built-in TOML support, better exceptions, and typing improvements.
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Speeding up sort performance in Postgres 15
Deep dive into the sort performance improvements in PostgreSQL 15, along with charts to visualize what types of queries will be faster. Includes speedups in single column sorts, reduced memory consumption with generation memory context, specialized sort routines for common datatypes, & use of k-way merge.