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What we learned copying all the best code assistants
From GitHub Copilot to ChatGPT to Claude Artifacts, how Val Town borrowed the best of all the code generation tools
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 488 posts.
182
Why We're Moving on from Nix
Meet Railpack — the next iteration of the Railway builder, developed from the ground up on lessons from building over 14 million apps with Nixpacks.
183
A new experimental Go API for JSON
Go 1.25 introduces experimental support for encoding/json/jsontext and encoding/json/v2 packages.
184
Writing simple tab-completions for Bash and Zsh
Shell tab-completions can be very handy, but setting them up is complicated by the fact that half your users would be using Bash-on-Linux, while the other half will be using Zsh-on-OSX, each of which has different tab-completion APIs. Furthermore, most users exploring an unfamiliar CLI tool using tab completion…
185
Codex Is Live in Zed
From the Zed Blog: OpenAI's Codex AI agent is now available in Zed via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).
186
Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5
Many Ruby applications allocate objects. What if we could make allocating objects six times faster? We can! Read on to learn more!
187
Go 1.25 Release Notes
The latest Go release, version 1.25, arrives in August 2025 , six months after Go 1.24 . Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.
188
Context Rot: How increasing input tokens impacts LLM performance
Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically presumed to process context uniformly—that is, the model should handle the 10,000th token just as reliably as the 100th. However, in practice, this assumption does not hold. We observe that model performance varies significantly as input length changes, even on simple tasks…
189
Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations
Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations. An update on our exploratory research on model welfare.
190
Usability Improvements in GCC 15
GCC 15 brings better error messages and diagnostics for your code, including prettier execution paths and easier-to-read compiler errors for C++ templates.
191
From Rust to reality: The hidden journey of fetch_max
Tracing Rust AtomicU64::fetch_max from macro expansion and rustc intrinsics through LLVM atomicrmw umax down to the final x86-64 CAS loop.
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How has DeepSeek improved the Transformer architecture?
This Gradient Updates issue goes over the major changes that went into DeepSeek's most recent model.
194
One year after switching from Java to Go
I always told people memory is cheap, black magic is OK and efficiency doesn't matter, but I was wrong.
195
Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
196
Create and edit images with Gemini 2.0 in preview
Explore how to generate and edit images with Gemini 2.0 Flash, now in preview in Google AI Studio
197
Gemini CLI GitHub Actions
Today, we’re introducing Gemini CLI GitHub Actions. It’s a no-cost, powerful AI coding teammate for your repository. It acts both as an autonomous agent for critical rou…
198
Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
A deeper dive on our findings, what went wrong, and future changes we’re making.
199
We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly
Build powerful software environments and containerized operations from modular components and simple functions. Perfect for complex software delivery and AI agents. Built by the creators of Docker.
200
Addendum to GPT-5 system card: GPT-5-Codex
This addendum to the GPT-5 system card shares a new model: GPT-5-Codex, a version of GPT-5 further optimized for agentic coding in Codex. GPT-5-Codex adjusts its thinking effort more dynamically based on task complexity, responding quickly to simple conversational queries or small tasks, while independently working…
201
Lynx: Open Source Native Cross Platform framework used in TikTok
Today, we're excited to introduce Lynx, a family of technologies empowering developers to use their existing web skills to create truly native UIs for both mobile and web from a single codebase...
202
CocoaPods trunk read-only plan
The blog for CocoaPods.org the Cocoa Dependency Manager
203
Graceful Shutdown in Go: Practical Patterns
Go applications can implement graceful shutdown by handling termination signals (SIGTERM, SIGINT) via os/signal or signal.NotifyContext. Shutdown must complete within a specified timeout (e.g., Kubernetes’ terminationGracePeriodSeconds)…
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Strings Just Got Faster
In JDK 25, Strings used as keys in immutable Maps can be much faster.
206
Algebraic Semantics for Machine Knitting
As programming languages researchers, we’re entitled to a certain level of mathematical rigor behind the languages we write and analyze. Programming languages have semantics , which are definitions of what statements in the language mean. We can use those semantics to do all sorts of useful things, like error…
207
Why Tracebit is written in C#
A retro on some of the reasons we chose to build Tracebit in C#.
208
A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet
Starting with a 192-byte one-liner that implements a Reverse Polish Notation arithmetic compiler, we'll work backward to transform it into readable JavaScript by removing one code golf trick at a time
209
Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring Service from Java
Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world. In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend…
210
Migrating to Postgres
Since early 2022, Motion was on CockroachDB. Cockroach has many qualities going for it: effortless horizontal scaling, especially when…