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Creating the Longest Possible Ski Jump in “The Games: Winter Challenge”
An investigation into The Games; Winter Challenge
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
452
RIP pthread_cancel
I posted about adding pthread_cancel use in curl about three weeks ago, we released this in curl 8.16.0 and it blew up right in our faces. Now, with #18540 we are ripping it out again. What happened? short recap pthreads define “Cancelation points”, a list of POSIX functions where a pthread may be cancelled. In…
453
How IMAP works under the hood
Learning how the IMAP protocol actually works
454
The unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzing for porting programs
A simple strategy of having LLMs write fuzz tests and build up a port in topological order seems effective at automating porting from C to Rust.
455
Zig's Lovely Syntax
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
456
I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance
I needed to choose a framework for a mobile-first app at work. I started comparing Next.js, SolidStart, and SvelteKit, then expanded to 10 frameworks. The measurements revealed dramatic differences in bundle sizes, performance, and the real cost of framework choices.
457
Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C
UPDATED: 2025-02-15: Fixed some bugs in the examples and pointed out that you don't usually just want to panic on memory allocation failure.
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My first impressions of Gleam
What I’ve learned in my first few hours using Gleam for a small project.
459
My first attempt at iOS app development
A week ago, I knew absolutely nothing about Swift. Today, I have a working iOS app sitting on my Mac and my test device
460
Jujutsu VCS: Introduction and patterns
Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, when I finally…
461
Go Proposal: Secret Mode
Automatically erase memory to prevent secret leaks.
462
Rating 26 years of Java changes
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
463
Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
Matyáš Racek's blog
464
Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them
Programming languages have rapidly evolved in recent years. But in software development, the new often meets the old, and the scaffolding that OS gives for running new processes hasn’t changed much since Unix.
465
The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake
My presentation from the inaugural Better Software Conference, with notes.
466
Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
467
Write the damn code
You are a software engineer. Don't become a prompt refiner.
468
At the end you use `git bisect`
People rant about having to learn algorithmic questions for interviews. I get it — interview system is broken, but you ought to learn binary search at least.
469
How Compiler Explorer Works in 2025
How we handle 92 million compilations a year without everything catching fire
470
The Differences Between Deep Research, Deep Research, and Deep Research
Dive into the world of AI engineering with this exploration of Deep Research in report generation. Learn how LLM-as-a-judge systems, machine learning, and ev...
471
Using the most unhinged AVX-512 instruction to make fastest phrase search algo
Disclaimers before we start For those who don’t want to read/don’t care that much, here are the results. I hope after seeing them you are compelled to read. TL;DR: I wrote a super fast phrase search algorithm using AVX-512 and achieved wins up to 1600x the performance of Meilisearch. The source code can be found here…
472
DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase
How I use DeepWiki to speed up real coding work
473
When did people favor composition over inheritance?
The phrase "favor composition over inheritance" has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we're missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led…
474
FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be, and… I found I’m FP-pilled.
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Why we migrated from Python to Node.js
Why we rewrote our backend from Python/Django to Node.js one week after launching Skald.
478
Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk
Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. A different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk's syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.
479
Bare metal printf – C standard library without OS
Guide to implementing a C standard library for bare metal hardware using Newlib, enabling powerful functions like printf and malloc without relying on an operating system. This step-by-step guide demonstrates how to configure and integrate Newlib on RISC-V architecture, showing you how to redirect standard I/O through…
480
MCP doesn't need tools, it needs code
Exploration into providing MCPs with the most powerful of all tools: code.