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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful…
Marcin ‘mbork’ Borkowski has a nice post showing us how he trims video clips from our beloved editor. Trimming clips is something I do from time to ti...
A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view!
I have recently worked on making a web application out of my latest Rubik’s cube optimal solver . This involved building a rather complex C code base (with multithreading, SIMD, callback functions and whatnot) to WebAssembly via Emscripten , and writing a minimal amount of JavaScript and HTML for the frontend.
How quarterly fixit weeks help teams tackle small annoyances that never bubble up to the priority list.
Picking the technology stack for a project is an important and consequential decision. In the enterprise space in particular, it often involves a multi-year commitment with long-lasting implication...
Coding agents like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI represent a genuine step change in how useful LLMs can be for producing working code. These agents can now directly …
Matthew Weidner | May 21st, 2025 Home | RSS Feed Keywords: text editing, server reconciliation, Articulated
TL;DR: Giving LLMs the full output of tool calls is costly and slow. Output schemas will enable us to get structured data, so we can let the LLM orchestrate ...
In GitHub Actions, you can use the shell keyword to specify the shell that runs a given run: block. This keyword is optional for workflows but mandatory for action definitions.
We all know the current US President is one hell of an orator and often assures us that he has “the best words”:
How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
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.)
Can Gemini 2.5 replace CNN for object detection?
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:
Execution of C# code in Unity's Mono runtime is slow by today's standards, much slower than you might expect! Our game runs 2-3x faster on modern .NET compared to Unity's Mono, and in a few small benchmarks I measured speedups of up to 15x. I've spent some time investigating what's going on and in this article I will…
You don't need Elasticsearch for most projects. I built a simple search engine from scratch that tokenizes everything, stores it in your existing database, and scores results by relevance. Dead simple to understand and maintain.
A quick project spiraled into a marathon of AI missteps, hardware headaches, and hard-earned lessons. Welcome to the story of Deskthang.
Ever wondered why you need the underscore in target="_blank" to open a link in a new tab?
The first commit to tinygrad was October 17, 2020. It’s been almost three years since we raised money. The company is 6 people now. The codebase is 18,935 lines not including tests.
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
The R ecosystem and the case for extreme empathy in software maintenance
Homomorphic encryption allows a computer to run programs on encrypted data. Learn how homomorphic encryption works through interactive examples, build a homomorphically encrypted CRDT and see whether it has promise for local-first software.
Several years ago, I spent a serious chunk of time figuring out how to make really teensy ELF executable files. I started down this path because I was annoyed that all of my programs, no matter how short they were, never got smaller than 4k or so. I felt that was excessive, for C, and so I started looking at what ELF…
Antonio Cuni's blog
There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995).
Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here .
My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a…
A brief introduction into computer vision and image processing using Grayskull library.
