1
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 105 posts.
2
The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
3
Perlisisms (1982)
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
4
Welcome to Gas Town
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
5
Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors, pt. 1 (2013)
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
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Rewriting Bun in Rust
Why & how we rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust
7
We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
How a team of 16 parallel Claude agents wrote a Rust-based C compiler from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel, and what it taught us.
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What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.
9
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.
10
Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
11
SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
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Clojure: Transducers
Transducers are composable algorithmic transformations. They are independent from the context of their input and output sources and specify only the essence of the transformation in terms of an individual element. Because transducers are decoupled from input or output sources, they can be used in many different…
13
PHP2Shell by Calif Research
A tale of two PHP remote vulnerabilities
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Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now
PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
15
Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability
yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead … Continue…
16
Git at any scale
Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version of the information manager from hell (that's actually the tagline for Git, look it up ), he had a very specific use case in mind: his own. He wanted to replace BitKeeper, the distributed version control system that was…
17
How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)
These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me (bs at cs dot tamu dot edu). Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
18
Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
This post is an expanded version of a presentation I gave at the recent WebAssembly CG meeting in Munich. WebAssembly has come a long way since its first release in 2017. The 1.0 version of WebAssembly was already a great fit for low-level languages like C and C++, and immediately enabled many new kinds of…
19
Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was a Correct Rejection
My disdain for astrology is so utter, and my esteem for Godier’s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he’d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology…
20
Contributor Poker and Zig's AI Ban
You should always change doors when playing Monty Hall
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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
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AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals
A compressed 8KB docs index in AGENTS.md achieved 100% on Next.js 16 API evals. Skills maxed at 79%. Here's what we learned and how to set it up.
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Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5
A substantial improvement in intelligence and behavior over Composer 2, particularly on long-horizon agentic tasks.
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Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
We're adopting Rust as our C++ successor language, and using AI agents to accelerate the transition.
25
Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed
Across 16 coding models, hashline’s content-hash line anchors beat patch for 14 models; the weakest models gained the most.
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How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
A randomized trial with 52 developers found AI assistance lowered comprehension scores, except when used for explanations rather than delegation.
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Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers
Modern Object Pascal Introduction: units, classes, generics, memory management, exceptions and more.
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Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
Describing the story behind how critical security vulnerabilities were found and fixed.
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SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities
SWE-bench Verified is increasingly contaminated and mismeasures frontier coding progress. Our analysis shows flawed tests and training leakage. We recommend SWE-bench Pro.
30
What's the best programming language for coding agents?
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no…