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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 967 posts.
I imported the entire Linux kernel git history into pgit's PostgreSQL-backed storage. 1,428,882 commits, 24.4 million file versions, 20 years of development. Here's what the kernel looks like when you can just ask.
Poking at the geometry of an image model's feature space.
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. What the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, and my guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)
TL;DR: I believe Odin's inline assembly is currently the best out of any language.The most important aspects are of this article listed below. I am not aware of any other assembly (GCC/Clang/Rust/Go...) that would combine all of these aspects:Inline assembly is organized into "templates", similar to and callable as…
If you just need bash, why do you need codemode?
The barrier to entry for building software has collapsed. The barrier to building something that matters hasn’t moved an inch.
It all started with a routine task. I use GitHub issues for all of my public-facing projects but my preference is keeping track of things in Org Agenda. To reconcile the two, I would manually...
Building httpz, a high-performance HTTP/1.1 parser with zero heap allocation using OxCaml's unboxed types, local allocations, and mutable local variables.
You can't open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like "agentic engineering" or "openclaw" into your beautiful but disapproving face. I'm terrible at predicting the future—you should ask me about selling NVIDIA stock in early 2022 some time—but one thing seems…
The missing chapter of Hacker's Delight
Philosophy - Sciences - Geekery - Art - Life - Coaching - Fun < Simplify Everything
The four-pane System Browser has shaped Smalltalk development for forty years. It’s still brilliant at providing context. But the real problem may not be the browser itself—it may be the lack of composition between the tools that surround it.
Why I built superlite, an autonomous build workflow for Claude Code that doesn't ask permission every four minutes: how it works, how to use it, and the benchmarks.
A presentation of why, and how, I started using Emacs
I was intrigued by Jev and the self-hostable projects appearing around it, such as OpenJev and SemIf . Reading about them introduced me ...
How the KV cache gives every AI conversation a physical weight in silicon, and what happens when the memory runs out.
Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I’m going to expand on …
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
(this post figured on HNews here) This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any
When code execution really is all you need. Exploring what happens when an AI agent can only write and run code.
Fuzz testing is incredibly effective for mechanically discovering software defects, yet remains underused and neglected. Pick any program that must gracefully accept complex input, written in any language , which has not yet been been fuzzed, and fuzz testing usually reveals at least one bug. At least one program…
The personal website of Matthew Kosarek
