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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 967 posts.
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…
Lotus Notes had encryption, rich text, and read receipts before email did. Why it still failed, and the dangers of starting software from scratch.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
When timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
It has been about four months since I returned to Zig after being absent for a few years. In this time, I have written some software in Zig and reengaged with the community, online and in person. I decided to share some of that experience, including what I have liked about Zig so far and what I haven't. I'll include…
Magic files and where to find them: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .mailmap, .git-blame-ignore-revs, .lfsconfig, and more.
The git flag I assumed was an LLM hallucination
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
You all know me, I love exploring new memory safety approaches and blending them together in weird ways.
There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse.
Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a major difference between Wasm and all…
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …
I recently saw an interesting YouTube video by “Physics for the Birds”. The main video is about matrixes, but he used flags to explain some of the operations on matrixes:
That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard's Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform.
Software engineer, Warsaw.
In Go, go.mod acts as both manifest and lockfile. There is never a reason to look at go.sum.
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] .
Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
When OpenAI released their proof that solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up in finite time, they also released a formal proof in Lean 4.
A tour of erm, a local CLI that removes disfluencies from English speech recordings using faster-whisper, a few detectors that look at the audio directly, and ffmpeg.
Recovering and preserving Crimsonland, the 2003 top-down shooter, through reverse engineering of its original binary.
I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.
I had seen many talks about coroutines but it never really clicked where I could use them outisde of async IO. Until I looked at how Unity uses them in C#.
I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience . An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a thousand agents so they can do even more of that.
The transition to the Rust version of the React Compiler for the 1,036-file React Router codebase resulted in a significant speed increase, improving build times from 14.3 seconds to 0.81 seconds. The new compiler addresses previous limitations and ensures consistency across the toolchain, making it easier to manage…
The website of Ike Saunders
