Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,826 posts.
PyPy for low-latency systems
PyPy for low-latency systems Recently I have merged the gc-disable branch, introducing a couple of features which are useful when you need...
NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques
NoSQL databases are often compared by various non-functional criteria, such as scalability, performance, and consistency. This aspect of NoSQL is well-studied both in practice and theory because sp…
Super fast aggregations in PostgreSQL 19
See how PostgreSQL 19 speeds up aggregations by aggregating before joins, with a benchmark showing over 5x faster execution.
C++23: Removing garbage collection support
If we go through the list of C++23 features, we can stumble upon the notion of garbage collection twice. Once among the language and once among the library features. Both entries refer to the same paper (P2186R2): garbage collection (GC in short) support is getting removed from C++. Just to make it clear, it’s not…
A Proposal for Adding Generics to Go
Generics is entering the language change proposal process
Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
How to stop functional programming
You go into work and discover that a coworker isn't happy with some code you wrote because they don't understand it. They go to your manager and tell them that you're being a problem by writing code they don't understand. Your manager, being very skilled in conflict resolution, makes a technical decision to avoid…
Why I’m not leaving Python for Go
First of all, Go seems like a great language. It has an excellent tutorial which I joyfully went through and found: Go is Fast. Concurrent by design. Typed (important for JIT and IDE’s) but n…
Kotlin 1.4
Today we’re releasing Kotlin 1.4.0! Over the past years, we’ve been working hard on making Kotlin a programming language that is fun, enjoyable, and productive to work with. To continue our pursuit of this goal with this version of Kotlin, we put a lot of energy and effort into improving the performance and quality of…
In Praise of Stacked PRs
Managing sets of small, dependent PRs enables faster review and increased developer velocity
sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library
Over the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
Union types in C# 15
C# 15 introduces union types — declare a closed set of case types with implicit conversions and exhaustive pattern matching. Try unions in preview today and see the broader exhaustiveness roadmap.
React is the new jQuery
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Using TypeScript with React
This post is based on a talk I gave at the React JS & React Native Bonn Meetup.It aims to answer the following questions: What’s TypeScript? How can I ...
Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back
Kiro, Spec-kit, Bmad, Tessl, and other SDD frameworks turn business analysts into Markdown reviewers. Isn't there a more agile way to use Coding Agents?
Docker Considered Harmful (2016)
A note in advance: This is absolutely not about Docker being too "opinionated" for me, or other tools being more flexible. I believe that learning and using Docker is just plain more complicated than learning and using the tools I describe below. Docker is genuinely more complex and harder to use than the…
My stack is HTML+CSS
My stack will outlive yours
Software architects should be involved in earliest system engineering activities
Today's major defense systems rely heavily on software-enabled capabilities. However, many defense programs acquiring new systems first determine the physical items to develop....
Attitudes That Lead to Maintainable Code
There are many great coding principles, but it can be hard to keep them all in your head at once. Instead, I try to remember these three attitudes.
Two custom React hooks
Open-source, swappable packages and an AI that assembles them into full-stack apps that scale.
Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.