The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
Russ Cox is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He was a leading figure in the development of the Go programming language and environment working with co-creators Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, and serving as technical lead for over a decade. Before Go, he created Google Code Search, which provided…
When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my work.
The manifestation of my imposter syndrome, for me and today, is what does it mean to be a software engineer. There’s a lot more noise than signal on the Internet about agentic engineering, wh…
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
Working with AI is less predictable than traditional software. That makes leadership skills such as context, clarity, and feedback more valuable.
Micropayment-powered stories
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing…
Good engineers plan before they build. The workflow I grew up seeing: write an RFC describing the feature, split it into smaller issues, then build them, each issue often blocking the next. The structure of the work was locked in before a single line of code existed.
AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.
Ten years and one day ago, on August 9, 2016, I abruptly quit my job. I mark this occasion as the beginning of my indie software developer career. Happy anniversary to me and to my customers!
Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy.
A casual, roughly bimonthly Sunday coffee meetup for Hacker News posters in Helsinki. Open to anyone with 64+ HN karma.
In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact…
Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:
Want to follow along with Rust development? Curious how you might get involved? Take a look!
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
The year was 2015, halfway through my Computer Science bachelor’s degree. I had spent a few months contributing to open source and my confidence levels were high, so I thought: why not aim for a summer internship at Microsoft? Microsoft, of all places, might sound like a weird company to target in 2026. Back then…
I think behind a lot of the enthusiasm around AI is a dream of being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.
I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before
tldr: I uncovered Y Combinator was scoring 100k+ founders around the world through Paxel, I broke it (possible easter egg) + found a vulnerability that let anyone forge and push any score to their ranking database, courtesy of an unvalidated hmac
Appaji, a Computer Science graduate from IIT Patna and former intern at Arista Networks, is a Software Engineer at Infinite Reality. Passionate about building innovative web experiences, with a strong interest in sustainable and customer-focused startups.
I fought against Google’s Pentagon AI deal from the inside. Powerful people and institutions failed to keep their AI ethics promises under pressure.
and why communication is so important
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
One of the best things about LLMs is that they'll write code for you, all day long. Who cares about DRY? You don't have to be the one updating the same long con...
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.
