1741
My first attempt at iOS app development
A week ago, I knew absolutely nothing about Swift. Today, I have a working iOS app sitting on my Mac and my test device
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.
1742
LLMs and Elixir: Windfall or deathblow?
How the Elixir community can survive — and thrive — in an age of LLMs.
1743
How Compiler Explorer Works in 2025
How we handle 92 million compilations a year without everything catching fire
1744
Prompt engineering playbook for programmers
Turn AI coding assistants into more reliable development partners
1745
Why I wrote the BEAM book
The story behind writing The BEAM Book-ten years, three publishers, and an open‑source sprint.
1746
Machine Code Isn't Scary
Machine code isn't scary. If you can make sure your JSON conforms to a JSON schema, you can write machine code.
1747
Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city
I made a library that takes GPS coordinates and gives you the state.
1748
CVE 2025 31200
Background On April 16, 2025, Apple released a patch for a bug in CoreAudio which they said was “Actively exploited in the wild.” This flew under the radar a bit. Epsilon’s blog has a great writeup of the other bug that was presumably exploited in this chain: a bug in RPAC. The only thing out there that I am aware of…
1749
How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)
For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network…
1750
Structured Errors in Go (2022)
Bridge the gap between structured logging and errors in Go
1751
Progressive JSON
Why streaming isn't enough.
1752
Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)
Lessons on incentives and scaling from two years as a teaching assistant
1753
Implementing a Forth
(Image of "Four-Armed Chuck" programming a PDP-11 is from my giant write-up of Forth .)
1754
Beware of Fast-Math
One of my more frequent rants, both online and in person, is the danger posed by the "fast-math" compiler flag. While these rants may elicit resigned acknowledgment from those who already understand the dangers involved, they do little to help those who don't. So given the remarkable paucity of writing on the topic…
1755
Simpler Backoff
Exponential backoff with jitter is de rigeur for making service calls. This code, or something like it, probably looks really familiar: func do(ctx context.Context) error { const ( maxAttempts = 10 baseDelay = 1 * time.Second maxDelay = 60 * time.Second ) delay := baseDelay for attempt := range maxAttempts { err :=…
1756
De Bruijn notation, and why it's useful
At least a familiarity with the lambda calculus, including how it is evaluated. Some base knowledge of programming languages is also assumed.
1757
1758
Java Virtual Threads Ate My Memory: A Web Crawler's Tale of Speed vs. Memory
I built a simple web crawler using good old platform threads. It was just a multithreaded crawler, nothing fancy. But then, curiosity…
1759
What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway
An explainer for people who don't know computer science and are mildly curious
1760
Compiling a neural net to C for a speedup
A cozy little corner of the web.
1761
Compiler Explorer and the promise of URLs that last forever
How we're preserving 12,000 legacy links as Google's URL shortener rides into the sunset
1762
LLM codegen go brrr – Parallelization with Git worktrees and tmux
If you're underwhelmed with AI coding agents or simply want to get more out of them, give parallelization a try. After seeing the results firsthand over the past month, I'm ready to call myself an evangelist. The throughput improvements are incredible, and I don't feel like I'm losing control of the codebase.
1763
Atomics and Concurrency
This is going to be a long post, but I hope you get value out of it. This wasn’t an easy topic to tackle but it was definitely worthwhile!
1764
Why are 2025/05/28 and 2025-05-28 different days in JavaScript?
A Date in JavaScript always represents a point in time (i.e. milliseconds since epoch). This is more apparent when printing out the full date string:
1765
Running GPT-2 in WebGL: Rediscovering the Lost Art of GPU Shader Programming
A few weeks back, I implemented GPT-2 using WebGL and shaders (Github Repo) which made the front page of Hacker News. Here is a short write-up over what I …
1766
Pyrefly vs. Ty: Comparing Python's two new Rust-based type checkers
A deep dive into Meta's pyrefly and Astral's ty - two new Rust-based Python type checkers that both promise faster performance and better type inference.
1767
Making C and Python Talk to Each Other
How to Use Python in C
1768
Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp
Hacker News was written in the Arc lisp dialect, a dialect created by Paul Graham. Arc was implemented on top of Racket, but that has now changed. HN runs on top of SBCL since (at least) September of 2024.But why? For performance reasons. I recently noticed that Hacker News no longer uses paging for long threads. In…
1769
TIL: timeout in Bash scripts
How to use the `timeout` command to terminate processes after a specified time and how to combine it with `until` for smarter shell scripting.
1770
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world. Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes. Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus …