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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
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I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
I built KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound LLMs and coding agents, and benchmarked the major models against it.
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How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.
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DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots
(This post is part of a series on the subject of my hobby project, which is recreating the C source code for the 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II by reverse engineering the original binaries.)
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Prolog Basics Explained with Pokémon
Demonstrating the basics of logic programming with data from the Pokémon games.
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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that…
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Solving Factorio Quality
I play Factorio the normal way: by writing matrix math code to plan the factory.
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How close can pure functional programming get to C?
In Why Lean is Faster Than Rust , the author shares an impressive result: a DEFLATE compression library written in Lean 4 , a functional programming language and proof assistant, outperforming an equivalent Rust package that crates.io says has been downloaded over a billion times. From the article:
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How I'm Productive with Claude Code
It’s been about 6 weeks since I joined Tano, and this is what my commit history looks like:
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Every Byte Matters
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
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GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
On the 31st August I got an email from a customer, telling me that they had found an imitation of my data wrangling software on Github. I’m not linking to it, but here is a screenshot: It is …
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2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026
Calibrate your enthusiasm
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DeepSeek-V4-Flash means LLM steering is interesting again
Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the…
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SwiftUI After 7 Years
Back in 2019, SwiftUI was announced as the future of Apple development. Seven years later, it still feels like a beta version struggling with stability, performance, and many other aspects. What’s actually wrong with SwiftUI?
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The vi family
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
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Backtrack-Free Cursive
Making English more enjoyable to write.
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Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons
I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them: Here’s one for the…
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Java 26 is here
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
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Levels of Agentic Engineering
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
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XML is a cheap DSL
Lessons about XML from the open source IRS Tax Withholding Estimator.
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High-Level Is the Goal
Why should anyone care about low-level programming?
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Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
Somewhere between 'ask Claude for a quick opinion' and 'Claude is writing our Jira tickets,' we lost the plot. AI agents are brilliant implementers. They're also confidently wrong about every decision that matters. And when it all falls over, they won't be the ones carrying the bag.
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My “grand vision” for Rust
I don’t think I’ve ever quite articulated my “grand vision” for Rust, despite having written a fair bit about the language and its features. There is a lot I could say here, but currently there are three directions of development which I find particularly interesting:
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Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals
As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. This feature allows the compiler to detect which individual functions and declarations have changed since a project was last built, recompile only that…
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Fix your tools
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…
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Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has finally come to Python. I spent some time exploring it, and here is how it works.
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I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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The Last Technical Interview
Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s…
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Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
Ten lessons for coding with agents, from implementing to learn to remembering that code is cheap but maintenance and security aren’t.