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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
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Claude Advanced Tool Use
Claude can now discover, learn, and execute tools dynamically to enable agents that take action in the real world. Here’s how.
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Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
While discussing with fellow developers, I was asked the following question a few times: We spend most of our time as developers thinking, not editing code; so, why invest time into mastering a complicated code editor, and why lose some cognitive resources on thinking about text editing instead of about the real…
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Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
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93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
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Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in new code quickly yields durable and compounding gains. This year we lo…
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C Is Best (2025)
Since its inception on 2000-05-29, SQLite has been implemented in generic C. C was and continues to be the best language for implementing a software library like SQLite. There are no plans to recode SQLite in any other programming language at this time.
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Function calling and other API updates
We’re announcing updates including more steerable API models, function calling capabilities, longer context, and lower prices.
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The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
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Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
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How to do distributed locking
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
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Three Tribes of Programming (2017)
There's an old joke that computer science is a lie, because its not really about computers, and its not really a science. Funny joke. Everyone laughs, then someone says "Yeah but it sort of is about computers though, isn't it?". Feet shuffle awkwardly. Someone clears their throat and before you
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How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples
40 common false assumptions programmers make about names, debunked with real-world examples from global naming systems and identity practices.
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Show HN: Domain-tailored CRDTs for collaboration without server involvement
An in-depth exploration of a new class of expressive, performant, and intuitive CRDTs, together with macOS and iOS sample code.
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Generating code
How to use go generate.
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Lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions
Quick summary of my recommendations on compare-by-hash: If you are using compare-by-hash to generate addresses for data that can be supplied by malicious users, you should have a plan to migrate to a new hash every few years. For example, BitTorrent falls into this category, but rsync doesn't. Keep in mind that new…
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Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
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The FFmpeg/Libav situation
One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover , mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly…
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Numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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Rewriting the Technical Interview (2020)
Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not…
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Aligning Language Models to Follow Instructions
We’ve trained language models that are much better at following user intentions than GPT-3 while also making them more truthful and less toxic, using techniques developed through our alignment research. These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as the default language models…