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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
A few years ago I was in a meeting with developers and someone asked a simple question: “What’s the right framework for a new Windows desktop app?” Dead silence. One person sugges…
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Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed
Across 16 coding models, hashline’s content-hash line anchors beat patch for 14 models; the weakest models gained the most.
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We mourn our craft
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some…
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5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
All characters fit within a 5 pixel square, and are safe to draw on a 6x6 grid. The design is based off of lcamtuf's 5x6 font-inline.h, which is itself inspired by the ZX Spectrum's 8x8 font.
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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
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How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
The core of tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Warp isn't magic. It's about 200 lines of straightforward Python. Let's build one from scratch.
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I fixed Windows native development
Imagine you’re maintaining a native project. You use Visual Studio for building on Windows, so you do the responsible thing and list it as a dependency
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The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
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Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my …
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Transcribe.cpp
A place to play around with technology and make it easy and fun
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A Decade of Slug
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
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I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
Hugo Daniel's site about ideas and software experimentations
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Regressive JPEGs
One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.
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Programming Still Sucks
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a…
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A Modern Web App in C
A modern web app written in c and served the old way: CGI, SQLite and a single binary. No frameworks, no containers and no regrets.
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How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
The secret is humble UITextField.
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It's still ok to enjoy programming
Programming is fun!
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Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
Conversations, my federated instant messaging client for Android, started out as many traditional open-source projects do: as an attempt to scratch my own itch. Development started in January 2014 in my student dormitory, and within weeks I started dogfooding and using the client as the primary means of communicating…
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I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs
How to delete all merged git branches locally with a single command. This one-liner has been in my zshrc since 2017 — I found it buried in the CIA's Vault7 l...
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Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability
yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead … Continue…
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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. The most vital question everybody’s asking themselves is: What’s …
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You said no MCP
Pi now supports MCP. Why we changed our minds, what changed in MCP and in Pi, and what Codemode is.
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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the …
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Small programming tricks
A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.
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Before GitHub
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction