The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,423 posts.
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my…
Magic files and where to find them: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .mailmap, .git-blame-ignore-revs, .lfsconfig, and more.
What are database transactions and how do SQL databases isolate one transaction from another?
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
Applying the type-driven mindset to rust via the "Parse, don't Validate" pattern
AI agents are good at doing one thing at a time. Give Claude a focused task and it performs. But real work isn’t one task. It’s a tree of tasks with dependencies, parallelism, and context that needs to flow between them.
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
a pungent monad odor that attracts mathochists
How to delete all merged git branches locally with a single command. This one-liner has been in my zshrc since 2017 — I found it buried in the CIA's Vault7 l...
Minions are Stripe’s homegrown coding agents, responsible for more than a thousand pull requests merged each week. Though humans review the code, minions write it from start to finish. Learn how they work, and how we built them.
Understanding large codebase can be incredibly difficult. In this post I walk through how I learn a codebase use turbopack as my case study.
Modern browsers support reactive web interfaces without React, Vue, or Angular. Web components and shadow DOM make frameworks optional.
Farewell, Rust for web. For now…
To me, one of the most annoying parts of software engineering is writing code that doesn’t require thinking. It’s just a typing exercise, and that’s boring.
Analysis of millions of human-agent interactions shows agent turns getting longer, with software engineering making up nearly half of tool calls.
Using Oban to seamlessly exchange durable jobs between Elixir and Python applications through a shared PostgreSQL database.
Two years in the making: Electrobun hits v1 with first-class macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu builds, tiny differential updates, and a framework that finally feels built for modern desktop apps.
Python and JavaScript/TypeScript AI frameworks are reinventing what telecom solved in 1986. What 40 years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents.
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
If you compile your app for AVX2 and it runs on Windows ARM under Prism emulation, is it faster or slower than compiling for SSE2-4.x? I assumed it would be roughly the same — maybe slightly slower due to emulation overhead, but AVX2's wider operations would compensate. The
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)
Wherein we make progress towards solving one of the most vexing problems of Computer Science — naming things.
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
GPU code can now use Rust's async/await. We share the reasons why and what this unlocks for GPU programming.
Go 1.26 includes a new implementation of go fix that can help you use more modern features of Go.
Optimisation of bloom filters in Floe using double bit setting with lightweight hashing.
During the rapid technological advancements of the early 1990s, the video game industry was on the cusp of a massive addition - another dimension. With console shenanigans like the Super FX chip giving players a taste of 3D, hype was at an all-time high. But the games released for home consoles were nothing compared…
Synchronization barriers let you test for race conditions with confidence.
You can't open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like "agentic engineering" or "openclaw" into your beautiful but disapproving face. I'm terrible at predicting the future—you should ask me about selling NVIDIA stock in early 2022 some time—but one thing seems…
