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MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Or: The Day My Toaster Started Taking Phone Calls
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
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Jemalloc Postmortem
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
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Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out
Git repositories seem like an elegant solution for package registry data. Pull requests for governance, version history for free, distributed by design. But as registries grow, the cracks appear.
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Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
LLMs make it easier to write code, but understanding, reviewing, and maintaining it still takes time, trust, and good judgment.
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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji
With ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner) sequences you could in theory encode an unlimited amount of data in a single emoji.
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Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?
In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?", in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of…
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It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA
Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.
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A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate
Yes, probably.
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My first contribution to Linux
I upstreamed my first kernel patch, and it was easier than I thought it would be.
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React is winning by default and slowing innovation
Exploring how React's dominance by default stifles frontend innovation, and why deliberate framework choices lead to better tools for performance, developer experience, and ecosystem diversity.
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A visual introduction to big O notation
A visual introduction to big O notation.
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The AI coding trap
If you ever watch someone “coding”, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard.
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Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems
Use the right tool for the job.
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I made my VM think it has a CPU fan
...so the malware would finally shut up and run
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Don't guess my language
If you’re still using IP geolocation to decide what language to show, stop screwing around. It’s a broken assumption dressed up as a feature.
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Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp
Hacker News was written in the Arc lisp dialect, a dialect created by Paul Graham. Arc was implemented on top of Racket, but that has now changed. HN runs on top of SBCL since (at least) September of 2024.But why? For performance reasons. I recently noticed that Hacker News no longer uses paging for long threads. In…
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I used o3 to find a remote zeroday in the Linux SMB implementation
In this post I’ll show you how I found a zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel using OpenAI’s o3 model. I found the vulnerability with nothing more complicated than the o3 API ̵…
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You already have a Git server
If you have a git repository on a server with ssh access, you can just clone it:
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I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer
How I reverse-engineered PureGym's API to build a working Apple Wallet pass with PassKit, Vapor, and mitmproxy - end-to-end iOS reverse engineering walkthrough.
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Go is still not good
Previous posts Why Go is not my favourite language and Go programs are not portable have me critiquing Go for over a decade.
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Fun with uv and PEP 723
How to use uv and the Python inline script metadata proposal PEP 723 to run scripts seamlessly.
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If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds.
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A critical look at MCP
"MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data…
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Python’s new t-strings
Dave Peck's home on the web. Dave is an independent software developer, investor, and civic technologist.
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How I program with agents
This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk. The first part, How I program with LLMs , covered ways LLMs can be adapted into our existing tools (basically, autocomplete) and how careful prompting can replace traditional web search…