The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,421 posts.
I’ll admit that until fairly recently I had no idea git worktrees existed. They’ve been part of git for a decade1 and I never once needed them. Feature branches did the job just fine - create a branch, do the work, merge it, delete it, and start over. What finally introduced me to worktrees was, of all things, AI…
I've been testing a simple prompt with different model and harness combinations to work out which one produces best results. I do this in /goal mode.
We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse , indicating that whatever defaults developers are using may not work very well. Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use…
Raymond Chandler would have loved generative AI
The very same week we signed our first ever angel investor for Plastic SCM, in early summer of 2005, Linus Torvalds announced Git. I had spent more than a year pitching investors to build a new version control, and suddenly the creator of Linux was building one himself. That week I understood the road ahead was going…
Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without…
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
When I started programming, my whole day revolved around development. I’d wake up, write code, and go to sleep. And that’s how it was day in and day out. My entire social circle consisted of people who also wrote code. I studied frameworks, libraries, and various programming languages.
I challenged myself to make a tiny subset of Python in C.
In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.
Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A _business_ will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.
A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust's peculiarities, from a C++ developer's perspective.
An opposite view on .gitignore files.
Rietta patched a government client's Ruby on Rails site within hours of a 9.5 CVSS ActiveStorage CVE. Exploit attempts began before business hours resumed.
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
The transition to the Rust version of the React Compiler for the 1,036-file React Router codebase resulted in a significant speed increase, improving build times from 14.3 seconds to 0.81 seconds. The new compiler addresses previous limitations and ensures consistency across the toolchain, making it easier to manage…
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way?
small programs hide coupling
A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh…
A guide to bringing up the Linux Kernel and a userspace application on a new hardware (or in this case, a self-made emulator)
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
Go 1.24 replaced the built-in map’s bucket-based runtime with Swiss Tables. This article explains groups, control bytes, H1 and H2, probing, table growth, directories, deletion, load factor, and the experimental split-group layout.
Preview of Python Polars 2.0, bringing the streaming engine to all lazy queries
I can't play an instrument, so I worked out music theory in JavaScript instead. Twelve notes, scales and chords, derived from scratch with code you can hear.
It's time for another technical blog post about async Rust on embedded. This time we're going to pitch Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C on an STM32F446 microcontroller.
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Stripe Across is a grog. We hope you enjoy it.
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
