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Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
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Growing Trees
Growing procedural trees through competition for light: buds, resource allocation, shoot direction, and branch shedding.
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Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)
People say “Comments should explain why, not what.” I feel like starting a flame war today so I’m going to argue that comments should explain ‘what’ too. Please don’t use this as justification to write bad code, okay? Okay. First of all, why shouldn’t comments explain ‘what’? If you need comments to explain what’s…
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Lean now ships with verified kernels
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
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How to make Firefox builds 17% faster
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
457
A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
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5NF and Database Design
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…
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Girls just wanna have fast MPMC queues with bounded waiting
Disclaimer: An earlier version of this post claimed the structure is wait-free, this is incorrect. Being wait-free requires that failure or suspension of any thread can’t cause failure or suspension of another thread. This queue in fact does not fulfill that requirement. The main section which discusses the wait…
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Good CTE, Bad CTE
The planner treats CTEs very differently depending on how you write them. Here's what happens under the hood, version by version, through PostgreSQL 18.
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The Future of AI Software Development
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
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NixOS is making me less afraid
Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it . That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.
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Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
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What I learned by putting GitHub Copilot behind a MitM proxy
A look inside Copilot’s network traffic, harness, memory, and how context is becoming the product.
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--dangerously-skip-reading-code
What if we dutifully communicate the risks and trade-offs to our organizational leadership and they still want to take those risks
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Making deep learning go brrrr from first principles (2022)
So, you want to improve the performance of your deep learning model. How might you approach such a task? Often, folk fall back to a grab-bag of tricks that might've worked before or saw on a tweet. "Use in-place operations! Set gradients to None! Install PyTorch 1.10.0 but not 1.10.1!"
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2026 is an exciting year for the Rust compiler (and me)
Matyáš Racek's blog
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Emacs 31: An unofficial guide to Markdown-ts-mode
Rahul's Blog
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TruffleRuby
TruffleRuby started as my internship project at Oracle Labs in early 2013. It is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on the JVM, using the Graal dynamic compiler and the Truffle AST interpreter framework . TruffleRuby can achieve peak performance well beyond that possible in JRuby at the same time as…
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Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
Sticks tongue out at AI
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Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits
Tiger Style and matklad recommend pushing ifs up and fors down. This post looks at what the idiom actually says, where it shows up in query optimization and in the algebra of functional programs, and where the analogy stops paying for itself.
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Building Pi with Pi
Learnings from post-AI Open Source and how we’re approaching this so far.
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Progressive Web Components
Introducing Elena, a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components.
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Building reliable agentic AI systems
AI helping pharmaceutical researchers query decades of information buried in PDF reports
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What functional programmers get wrong about systems
Type systems verify properties of programs. Production correctness is a property of systems. The gap between these is where the interesting failures live.
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Modern Rendering Culling Techniques
🏠🏠🏠🌲🌲🌲🏠🌲🌲🏠🌲🌲🏠🌲🏠🌲❌🏠🌲🌲🌲
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Pandas Should Go Extinct
Pandas has taken us a long way, but it's time for a new bear
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The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
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A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust
Exploring tail-call-style interpreter implementation with an optimized Uxn emulator, on ARM, x86, and WebAssembly