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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 967 posts.
If you have ever tried to minimize a function with gradient descent, you probably noticed that some functions are a joy to optimize and others are a nightmare. The difference often boils down to two properties: strong convexity and L-smoothness. These two concepts define a “sandwich” of quadratic bounds around your…
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In my previous post I talk about how I got rid of hundreds of thousands of lines of Objective-C code while at Audible and I explain why keeping Objective-C code around is a terrible idea. And I explain that…
How electrons flowing through billions of microscopic switches etched into silicon become arithmetic, memory, and the software you use every day.
I've been a happy ready-player user for some time now. I consider the Emacs package fairly feature-complete, for my needs anyway. Well almost. While I...
So I built local.vibe — a friendly dashboard and local .vibe hostname for every local web app on your Mac. No more localhost:3000 vs localhost:5173 roulette.
There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn't have QA. I dig in.
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
When Mathematica seems to not to know how to simplify an expression, it may be doing the right thing, being more sophisticated than you expect.
Formal verification gates for AI coding loops, in the language you're already shipping.
I touched "every" OS so you don't have to
A worked out example of different job queueing semantics and how they affect workloads.
Farewell, Rust for web. For now…
On Canada Day (July 1), 2026, Anthropic shipped a surprising "easter egg" to users of Claude Code: `2.1.198` includes an efficiency bypass which allows agents to continue on without being blocked on direction from a human.
Learning how htmx works by building one from scratch.
In the previous part of the Build A Basic AI Agent From Scratch series, we added the essential tools to our agent to allow it to work…
An aggregation is some kind of summary of a set of data. This can be the sum, length, minimum, etc. It is quite common to want to calculate such a summary repeatedly, e.g. “the maximum noise level in dB for the past 30 seconds” for a nuisance detector. In such a case we say there is a sliding window over our data, and…
CVE is a database used for categorizing and reporting security vulnerabilities in software. There are various kinds of vulnerabilities that can be reported. Some of them are caused simply by bugs in the program logic (like a recent CVE reported in Cargo), but some of the most nasty ones are caused by memory unsafety…
Why I swapped GNU stow's symlink farm for chezmoi: one command to bootstrap a Mac with Homebrew packages and macOS settings, a small daily sync loop, and agent skills shared between Claude Code and Codex.
One year minus one week ago to the day I published an article announcing the new Scheme implementation I was writing, scheme-rs . Today I am excited to announce that scheme-rs has reached its first version, 0.1.0 . You can check it out at it’s website ( scheme-rs.org , which should be updated to scheme.rs at some…
From imperative chaos to nix-darwin
