481
I built a GPU back end for Emacs
A few months ago I became obsessed with a silly question: why does my Emacs, on a laptop with a perfectly capable GPU, draw all of its text using the…
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
482
Let Me Ch...
That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs. I still don’t know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I’d had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone…
483
Small Programs and Languages
My Implementing a Forth article got some great feedback, particularly around the subject of tiny Forth implementations. (And it was an excuse to list some of the tiniest Forths I’ve seen.)
484
Poisson Disk Sampling
Stripe Across is a grog. We hope you enjoy it.
485
Programming is Art
When I started programming, my whole day revolved around development. I’d wake up, write code, and go to sleep. And that’s how it was day in and day out. My entire social circle consisted of people who also wrote code. I studied frameworks, libraries, and various programming languages.
486
Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)
In the past few months, I’ve been stress-testing how far AI coding agents can take us when building real, production-grade distributed systems. The result: a Rust-based multi-Paxos consensus engine that not only implements all the features of Azure’s Replicated State Library (RSL) [1] — which underpins most major…
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How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)
Let’s say you’re creating a CLI tool which has to display syntax highlighted source code. You begin by choosing some colors which look nice with your chosen terminal theme:
489
Agent memory as a file format
Memoryfields - a vastly simpler way to do agent memory
490
Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase
When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach
491
How well do agents use test/verification techniques?
We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse , indicating that whatever defaults developers are using may not work very well. Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use…
492
Emacs Bedrock 2.0
Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without…
493
Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird
python has 6 pre-declared "constants": True , False , None , __debug__ , Ellipsis (or equivalently ... ), and NotImplemented . but they all behave slightly differently, for some reason.
494
What category theory teaches us about dataframes
Every dataframe library ships with hundreds of operations. pandas alone has over 200 methods on a DataFrame. Is pivot different from melt? Is apply different from map? What about transform, agg, applymap, pipe? Some of these seem like the same operation wearing different hats. Others seem genuinely distinct. Without a…
495
Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer
History of the development of my windowed operating system for 32-bit Am29000 processors when I was age 18.
496
I made Zig compute 33M satellite positions in 3 seconds
Update: I've since added multithreading and pushed astroz to 326M propagations/sec. Read the follow-up → I've spent the past month optimizing SGP4 propagat...
497
What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust
Righty-ho, I’m back from Rust Nation, and busily horrifying my teenage daughter with my (admittedly atrocious) attempts at doing an English accent 1 . It was a great trip with a lot of good conversations and some interesting observations. I am going to try to blog about some of them, starting with some thoughts…
498
Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching
Java 17 introduced sealed classes, which allow you to explicitly list the allowed sub-types of an interface or base class. For example, here’s a toy example using a sealed interface and records (in…
499
Ape Coding [fiction]
Ape coding is the software development practice where a human developer deliberately hand-writes source code.
500
Parallel coding agents with tmux and Markdown specs
A practical workflow for running 4–8 parallel coding agents using Claude Code, tmux, and a Markdown-based feature design system.
501
hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:
502
The Zen of Parallel Programming
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self....
503
Towards trust in Emacs
A post by Eshel Yaron introducing the Emacs Trust Manager
504
Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)
Please, feel free to gather better data yourself and prove me wrong. If you do so I'll link to it!
505
.gitignore Everything by Default
An opposite view on .gitignore files.
506
A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)
I wrote a specification for a new terminal escape sequence: OSC 7501, the Program Status Protocol . It lets any program tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting on the user, finished, or failed, and why.
507
Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
508
Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider
Against dependency cooldowns as a response to supply chain attacks
509
I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck
Archiving 104K files into tar.gz reduced I/O time by 43x and total processing time by 2.3x. The bottleneck was not disk speed, it was syscall overhead.
510
Tracing HTTP Requests with Go's net/HTTP/httptrace
net/http/httptrace has been in the standard library since Go 1.7 and most Go developers I talk to have never used it. It exposes hooks for the points in an outgoing HTTP request that you usually cannot see from outside the transport: DNS resolution, connection acquisition, TLS handshake, the moment bytes go on the…