361
The Valley of Webhooks
I've built the same webhook consumer three times at three companies. The fourth time, I want a better primitive.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
362
Don't classify, hallucinate
A useful pattern for LLM classification at scale is to let it hallucinate plausible, fake entities. Then resolve to real ones.
363
How to make a damn website (2024)
A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.
364
O(x)Caml in Space
On 23 April, Borealis booted in orbit on DPhi Space's ClusterGate-2: a pure-OCaml CCSDS protocol stack with end-to-end-encrypted command and control and post-quantum key rotation. OxCaml is what comes next.
365
What TLA+ can and can't check
Let's chill just a little bit on the "TLA+ will save AI from itself" narrative
366
An incoherent Rust
Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.
367
Navier-Stokes fluid simulation explained with Godot game engine
When I first stumbled upon fluid simulations in game dev I was amazed on how good the effect could be. I really wan...
368
Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had
SQLite has evolved far beyond a simple embedded database. Explore modern features like JSON, FTS5, window functions, strict tables, and more.
369
Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer
Understanding large codebase can be incredibly difficult. In this post I walk through how I learn a codebase use turbopack as my case study.
370
An agent in 100 lines of Lisp
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
371
Parametric CAD in Rust
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
372
Nix wrote half of my debugger
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
373
Linux is an interpreter
And why you would want to exec a cpio
374
After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell — Avi Press
375
The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem
The LISP curse is often quoted as the reason why so few libraries and reusable components exist for LISP dialects. According to the concept, LISP is so power...
376
Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter
This blog post and the companion video both explain an erosion technique I’ve worked on over the past eight months. The video has lots of e...
377
RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F#
around a year ago, we built a regex engine in F# that not only outperformed the ones in dotnet, but went above and beyond competing with every other industrial regex engine on a large set of industry-standard benchmarks. it also supports the full set of boolean operators (union, intersection, complement) and even a…
378
Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
When we first announced the transition to Plasma Wayland, one of Martin's slides from stated, "It's done when it's done!"
379
.NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
In this post I discuss the support for union types released in .NET 11, how they're implemented, the choices made, and how to create your own
380
When I reject AI code even if it works
AI can make implementation cheap while making review and judgment more expensive.
381
A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
382
The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh…
383
The reverts will continue until morale improves
Many readers will be aware that an unusually high number of features have been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after the beta period began. Having some reverts is not unusual, maybe one per cycle could be expected. But this time around, about 8 to 10 significant features, depending on how you count, have been…
384
Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that…
385
Make Tmux the OS
I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+
386
We have proof automation now
I've long had a soft spot for dependently-typed languages like Coq Rocq and Lean. They offer the possibility of a type system capable of encoding and enforcing arbitrarily subtle invariants. The sort of thing that, in regular languages, ends up (at best) as a comment, and which quickly gets lost as the size of the…
387
Faster than earcut: triangulating 3.7M map polygons in 489 ms
We published the triangulator of our map engine as earstrip, an ISC-licensed C++ and WebAssembly library. How it came to be: the ear clipper rebuilt one idea at a time and timed on 3.7 million polygons of real map data.
388
Everything old is new again: memory optimization
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full bl...
389
Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
I always felt a little bad for the ghosts in Pac-Man. They patrol the maze, they corner the guy, and then he eats a glowing pellet and suddenly they're the ones running for their lives. So I built a small game where you finally get to play the other side.
390
VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.