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Push ifs up and fors down
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,530 posts.
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A video game where you are an operating system
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be an OS?
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Technical debt as a lack of understanding
Some time back, I was working on a project where it felt like the timebomb of technical debt was exploding in our faces. We couldn’t refactor the whoositz because of the whatsitz and when we asked about the whatsitz no one knew about the whatsitz and how it exactly worked with the whoositz and there certainly weren’t…
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1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug
My blog, mostly about programming
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A non-mathematical introduction to Kalman filters for programmers
Read my manifesto on Code as an alternative to Mathematics. Code for this article can be found on this Colab Notebook should you choose to follow along. Why Kalman Filters? Kalman filters are ingenius. If you have never heard of them, then a very intuitive (and arguably reductive) way to think about them is to
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Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)
Blog of Jonas Bernoulli
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I used o3 to find a remote zeroday in the Linux SMB implementation
In this post I’ll show you how I found a zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel using OpenAI’s o3 model. I found the vulnerability with nothing more complicated than the o3 API ̵…
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Has UML died without anyone noticing?
Stuck with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect? Time to upgrade to Microsoft PowerPoint.
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Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…
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Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
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Little Things I Like to Do with Git
Handy Git tricks and aliases: leaderboards, praise, word-diff, branch history, daily recaps, changelog generation, and more in one quick guide.
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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.
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How to write idempotent Bash scripts
This blog post shows tips and tricks to write resilient and idempotent bash scripts.
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Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore
A fun, if predictable and pointless exercise.
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Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
The traditional soft deletion pattern using <code>deleted_at</code> columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative.
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WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal
A 360M model that pretends to be a terminal, and remembers what you did
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You already have a Git server
If you have a git repository on a server with ssh access, you can just clone it:
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How to Improve a Legacy Codebase
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out…
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A sufficiently detailed spec is code
Specifications do not address the limitations of agentic coding
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At what time of day do famous programmers work?
I was curious when the famous programmers do their work. And it is quite easy to find. The result of programmers work is a code. Code is stored in version control systems (VCS). When you put code in VCS the time is record.
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1/0 = 0
Disclaimer 2024-12-02 Since this rant is going viral again (again (again)), some disclaimers: I wrote this six years ago to “”“win”“” an ugly Twitter fight. I’m glad I anonymized the inciting tweet and hope I’m the only person still getting grief over this. The core interesting bit— why it’s mathematically valid to…
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Breaking up with JavaScript front ends
What features would be in that spec? Partial page updates? Animated transitions? Layered interactions?
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It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
That half-finished thing you threw on PyPI and forgot about? The world is genuinely slightly better for it existing.