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The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
Open Source, Web Development, and more
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
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How does Shazam work? (2022)
Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, I'll show you how one of the most popular apps, Shazam , does it. The founders of Shazam released a paper in 2003 documenting how it works, and I have been working on an implementation of that paper, abracadabra .
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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
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Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/S: How I Learned to Love Tail Calls in C
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
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LLM Architecture Gallery
A gallery that collects architecture figures from The Big LLM Architecture Comparison and related articles, with fact sheets and links back to the original sections.
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Coding is not solved
Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!
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Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
Lessons learned from 15 years of writing SumatraPDF, a great open-source PDF, eBook, and comic book reader for Windows
578
I found a bug in SQLite
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I introduced a high-performance write-path into rqlite and, to my great surprise, it exposed a bug in SQLite. The SQLite team quickly addressed the issue but let's take a look at the…
579
Fridge 0.2
My offgrid, solar powered, zero-battery-use fridge has sucessfully made it through spring, summer, fall, and more than enough winter.
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The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
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Make LLVM Fast Again
Clang is an “LLVM native” C/C++/Objective-C compiler, which aims to deliver amazingly fast compiles […]
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REST is the new SOAP
A journey through a trendy hell
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Choose Boring Technology
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…
588
Rust: A Critical Retrospective
Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…
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My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday—new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such …
590
Discord is not documentation
I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of…
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AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I've noticed while AI coding
Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.
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I’ve banned query strings
I don’t like people adding tracking stuff to URLs. Still less do I like people adding tracking stuff to my URLs.
593
Why xor eax, eax?
Why do compilers love xor-ing registers so much?
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I discovered a browser bug
I accidentally discovered a huge browser bug a few months ago and I'm pretty excited about it. Security engineers always seem like the "cool kids" to me, so I'm hoping that now I can be part of the club, and y'know, get into the special parties or whatever.
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The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
The Benjamin Franklin method for programming books: read a code sample, close the book, and rewrite it from memory to truly learn it.
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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
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Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)
Challenging projects every programmer should try
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"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it
Yahoo's public chat rooms have passed away . It is for the best, for the spam had spread everywhere. But they had a good run, operating for a decade and a half, an Internet eternity.