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UTF-8 is a brilliant design
Exploring the brilliant design of UTF-8 encoding system that represents millions of characters while being backward compatible with ASCII
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,535 posts.
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Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer
I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here’s what I learnt.
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Let's build a Chrome extension that steals as much data as possible
Today's adventure: DIY whole hog data exfiltration
184
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
185
Write more "useless" software
After my last blog post about Hurl, someone asked me, and I quote: "... why?" The simple answer is "for the joke." But the longer answer is that useless software [1] is a fantastic way to explore and experience the joy of computing. Play is an important part of exploration and joy.
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No Graphics API
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.
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The <output> Tag
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Hey… quick question, why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
190
Bye bye BetterSlack
I wrote BetterSlack and Slack asked me to take it down. Find the story here.
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Htmx Is the Future
Chris James, London - Software Engineer
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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
A few years ago I was in a meeting with developers and someone asked a simple question: “What’s the right framework for a new Windows desktop app?” Dead silence. One person sugges…
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Coding My Handwriting
Coding my handwriting in Javascript - how I did it and what I’m doing with it.
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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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Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work . I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the…
198
Libghostty is coming
Over two years ago, in one of my first public talks about Ghostty , I shared my vision for libghostty : an embeddable library for any application to embed their own fully functional, modern, and fast terminal emulator. Libghostty is finally starting to take shape, and I'm excited to share more details about my plans…
199
AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
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Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.
There’s a well-known quote by author Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I like it because it doesn’t attempt to be dogmatic: it encapsulates some basic guiding principles that get you 90% of the way there 90% of the time. Wikipedia describes the book the quote is from (emphasis mine):
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Acing the technical interview
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
203
We mourn our craft
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some…
204
5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
All characters fit within a 5 pixel square, and are safe to draw on a 6x6 grid. The design is based off of lcamtuf's 5x6 font-inline.h, which is itself inspired by the ZX Spectrum's 8x8 font.
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Monolith First (2015)
Going directly to a microservices architecture is risky, so consider building a monolithic system first. Split to microservices when, and if, you need it.
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Writing toy software is a joy
Why you should write more toy programs
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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…
209
I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
And it only took 21 hours. Linux 6.4 has a bug where it hangs on boot, but probably only 1 in 1000 boots (and rarer if using Intel hardware for some reason). It’s surprising to me that no one…
210
How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
The core of tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Warp isn't magic. It's about 200 lines of straightforward Python. Let's build one from scratch.