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Small programming tricks
A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,530 posts.
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I took "abusing the HTML5 History" to the next level.
We have completely reviewed the Nintendo switch for those who are considering to buy it. Learn all about the Nintendo gaming console and if it is for you.
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Before GitHub
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
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Making a 3D modeler in C in a week
The origin story of a 3D Modeler made very quickly
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Replacing Photoshop with NSString
Hello! This post somehow got a lot of attention. Thanks for visiting! If you like it, it would be awesome if you’d check my app Findings, a …
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Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems
Use the right tool for the job.
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I made my VM think it has a CPU fan
...so the malware would finally shut up and run
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Signed Char Lotte
“signed char lotte” is a computer program written by Brian Westley and the winner of the “Best Layout” award in the 1990 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The cleverness of the text is staggering. Superficially it reads as an epistolary exchange between two (possibly former) lovers, Charlotte and Charlie. At…
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The State of JavaScript in 2015
Developing Opinions - A blog by Jimmy Breck-McKye
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Embeddings are a good starting point for the AI curious app developer
Vector embeddings have been an Overton window shifting experience for me, not because they’re sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, but the opposite.
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Why Does “=” Mean Assignment?
Take the following code: a = 1 a = a + 1 print(a) A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and…
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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.
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Everyone should know SIMD
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
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The future of version control
A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control
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Don't guess my language
If you’re still using IP geolocation to decide what language to show, stop screwing around. It’s a broken assumption dressed up as a feature.
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Grayscale on 1-bit LCDs (2022)
Note: this post is also available in video format on YouTube . Some demo/ difference would be more obvious in video.
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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly , but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about…
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CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser
This project is discontinued. The github repos are still available as archives, but no deployment is maintained and no PRs will be accepted. You can still join the Discord if you want but it is not active.
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I decompiled the White House's new app
The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages.
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Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)
People have been comparing software components to LEGO blocks for a couple decades. We should be able to assemble applications by snapping together modular components, just like LEGOs. There has been progress, but for the most part we haven't realized the promise LEGO-style software development. Integrating two…
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Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting
An experiment in javascript-free syntax highlighting, made possible by opentype contextual alternates and COLR table
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I Miss Rails
The world of tech moves fast, and there’s always new frameworks and paradigms popping up that make developers’ lives easier and allow us to build more and more powerful applications. But, these transitions don’t always just make things better for developers - sometimes we take steps backwards and undo the progress we…
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Announcing Pipenv
I wrote a new tool this weekend, called Pipenv. Check it out on GitHub! Pipenv is an experimental project that aims to bring the best of all packaging...
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Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp
Hacker News was written in the Arc lisp dialect, a dialect created by Paul Graham. Arc was implemented on top of Racket, but that has now changed. HN runs on top of SBCL since (at least) September of 2024.But why? For performance reasons. I recently noticed that Hacker News no longer uses paging for long threads. In…