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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,534 posts.
Back in college, I was very interested in Java bytecode. When I got an internship at Google in 2013, I was skeptical of the security of the Java version of Google App Engine and got permission to spend the last week of my internship doing a mini red team exercise, trying to break into App Engine. This is the story of…
Learn how to perform face recognition using OpenCV, Python, and dlib by applying deep learning for highly accurate facial recognition.
A simple walkthrough of what RNNs are, how they work, and how to build one from scratch in Python.
From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for…
A little over a decade ago, there were some popular blogposts about whether Ruby was an acceptable Lisp or whether even Lisp was an acceptable Lisp . Peter Norvig was also writing at the time introducing Python to Lisp programmers . Lisp, those in the know knew, was the right thing to strive for, and yet seemed…
Calibrate your enthusiasm
I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…
(N.B. The word “fuck” appears multiple times in this post. I recommend that the reader temporarily not consider “fuck” as profanity, as it isn’t used that way here.)
These sound like dismissals or absurdities from the outside, but once you learn what they really mean, they take on a new light. In this article, I want to explain the third. (See the appendix if you are curious about the first two.)
Is what we do development anymore?
Note to readers: this is an April Fools post, intended to satirize bad arguments made against Rust. I have mixed feelings about it now, as I think people who understood the context appreciated the humor, but some people were confused. That’s partly because it’s written in a very persuasive style, and I mixed in some…
Let me tell you a story about how Windows users are deleting files from their installation and as a consequence end up in tears. Background The real and actual curl tool has been shipped as part of Windows 10 and Windows 11 for many years already. It is called curl.exe and is located in the … Continue reading deleting…
A few tips to level up your vim editing skills from beginner to intermediate.
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
For a few years now I have been working on the Haskell Language Server (HLS), and the lsp library for the LSP protocol and writing LSP servers. Unsurprisingly, I have developed some opinions about the design of the LSP! Recently I gave a talk about HLS and LSP at the Haskell Ecosystem Workshop at Zurihac 2024. One…
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…
Killing processes in a Unix-like system can be trickier than expected. Last week I was debugging an odd issue related to job stopping on Semaphore. More specifically, an issue related to the killing of a running process in a job.
Can Gemini 2.5 replace CNN for object detection?
SIMT The programming model of a GPU uses what has been coined "single instruction multiple thread." The idea is that the programmer writes t...
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?
I liked Go right away. It was close enough to C and Java to be instantly familiar, the examples and tutorials were straightforward, and I was quickly writing…
React starter kits (Vite, Next, Astro, Remix, React Router) which help React developers to start a React project in 2025 ...
When I wrote Why is Debian the way it is? , a year and a half ago, I was asked to also cover why Debian changes the software it packages. Here's a brief list of examples of why that happens:
Designing a dictionary of visually unambiguous characters for IDs.
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
