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Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits
I have seen a lot of public discussion around supply-chain attacks on the Python ecosystem, prompt injection risks when using coding agents,...
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 967 posts.
542
When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python
Some internet standards only support ASCII characters, but the world uses much more than the Latin alphabet. Thus, a mapping from Unicode to ASCII for use in domain names is required. NamePrep was...
543
Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
First foray into the Zig programming language
544
LLMs as the new high level language
[UPDATE 2026-06-09]: a few months on, I have more misgivings than certainties about this.
545
Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Solid core + capability-based sandboxes + LLMs = Users with superpowers
546
I hate compilers
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
547
Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
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548
747s and coding agents
Comparing a career flying the 747 and a career coding with AI assistance.
549
Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1
Floréal Technologies: Open software, French touch, International reach.
550
Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many…
551
An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
552
I hate: Programming Wayland applications
If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central…
553
Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good?
I care about Bun. I have been rooting for it since the initial release in 2022. I switched all my development from Node to Bun. I used it in the development of the Nue framework and now with my new project Hertta .
554
The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
Using the wiki on GitHub makes life more difficult for your users, and you as a maintainer. Use the `/docs` folder and GitHub Pages instead and keep your docs in sync with code
555
C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers
Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…
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Improved Git Diffs with Delta, Fzf and a Little Shell Scripting
Spotting differences in code is an important part of what we do, Delta is by far the best CLI diff tool I ever used.
558
C for Rust programmers
Interesting and unexpected details for Rust programmers learning the C programming language.
559
Are LLM merge rates not getting better?
I was reading the metr article on how llm code passes test much more often than it is of mergeable quality . They look at the performance of llm s doing programming when the success criterion is “passes all tests” and compare it to when the success criterion is “would get approved by the maintainer”. Unsurprisingly…
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How Complex is my Code?
What code complexity can mean — from Big O notation and Cyclomatic Complexity to the surprising insights psycholinguistics can offer software developers.
562
C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Let’s start with a question! Is this program well-defined? 1 2 3 4 int main() { while (true) ; } If you said yes, you’d be wrong — at least before C++26. A while (true); loop with no side effects used to be undefined behaviour. Compilers were free to assume it terminates, and some — Clang in particular — would…
563
I made a terminal pager
A writeup on implementing my own terminal viewport component in Go, which is used in my Terminal pager robinovitch61/lore and in my Kubernetes log viewer terminal application robinovitch61/kl.
564
I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times
I built buildprof (Github), an open-source tracing tool that shows where the time goes when you compile software on Linux. Here’s a realtime video of it profiling a clean build of ripgrep: Watch the …
565
curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd
How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`
566
Understanding the Go Compiler: The Linker
In the previous post , we watched the compiler transform optimized SSA into machine code bytes and package them into object files. Each .o file contains the compiled code for one package—complete with machine instructions, symbol definitions, and relocations marking addresses that need fixing. But your program isn’t…
567
Making a 88x31 button book using ImageMagick
Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick
568
You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML
Debunking an alarmingly common HTML misconception.
569
Rust is just a tool
A programming language should not be your identity.
570
Many hells of WebDAV
Standards are great, until they aren't