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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 967 posts.
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to…
Various thoughts on programming and technology.
Event designators have been hiding in not-so-plain-sight since the late 1970s — so powerful that forgetting might be part of a massive conspiracy to wear out developer keyboards faster than otherwise.
We have been using Signals in production for years via several modern front-end frameworks like Solid, Vue, and others, but few of us are able to explain how they work internally. I wanted to dig into it, especially diving deep into the push-pull based algorithm, the core mechanism behind their reactivity.
My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.
Back pressure for agents You might notice a pattern in the most successful applications of agents over the last year. Projects that are able to setup structure around the agent itself, to provide it with automated feedback on quality and correctness, have been able to push them to work on longer horizon tasks. This…
You already know that a + b * c + d is calculated as a + (b * c) + d. But how do you encode that knowledge precisely enough for a machine to act on it?
We made a YouTube video showing how NonBioS can deploy OpenClaw on a fresh Linux VM automatically - zero human intervention, about 7 minutes start to finish.
macOS ships a VulgarWordUsage.db and a dictionary that rates every word as vulgar, offensive or sensitive. Dumped for 199,000 English words and a dozen other languages.
~15 years ago, we had Balsamiq Mockups (2008). Deliberately sketchy. Intentionally low-fidelity. The comic-sans-looking wireframes were a…
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
A system freeze led us deep into Linux spinlock internals, where we helped find not one but three bugs in the kernel's resilient locking code used by eBPF.
Build a copy-and-patch JIT compiler in Rust, generate ARM64 machine code, and benchmark it against an interpreter and handwritten implementation.
std.Io.Threaded is one of the implementations of Zig's new Io interface that enables concurrency. This is a boring just use threads impl. I personally find it neat though --- it does this weird thing that I wanted to do for ages, that to my knowledge no one else is doing properly, and implements it better than I…
Bear with me, because some of these "lies" are going to feel obvious, or like unimportant trivia. In all honesty, that's not that far from the truth. However, I hope you'll let me try to build a detailed and fun illustration showing how something as mundane as email can break our expectations in surprising ways.
" A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
Erlang's mailbox design is more disciplined than Go's channels: only the owning process can read from a mailbox, and sends are asynchronous. Yet the four failure modes of shared mutable state still show up, just in different shapes.
Tailwind CSS is a very popular CSS framework among web developers. With no prior graphic design knowledge, it solves the standardization of spacing…
What is agentic engineering? - Agentic Engineering Patterns
It’s not off-by-one errors.
Reverse-engineering the .car file format used by Apple's asset catalogs and how to parse it without Apple's proprietary tools
Human DX optimizes for discoverability. Agent DX optimizes for predictability. What I learned building a CLI for agents first.
Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…
Ok, the title is a tongue-in-cheek, but there's very little thought put into files in most languages. It always feels a bit out of place... except in C. In fact, what you get is usually a worse version of C.
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
