691
Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language
I made a programming language. I'm sorry.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 968 posts.
692
Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
693
Memory layout in Zig with formulas
I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…
694
Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
695
Super Mario Derivations
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
696
Reverse engineering the Creative Katana soundbar to control it from Linux
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
697
Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)
In mid-December last year I started making my own programming language. It's waaay far from any production quality yet (though I did manage to write a working 1k LOC Monte-Carlo path tracer in it), but the project is on pause right now, so I figured it's a good time to write something about it.
698
Sort branches by last commit date
I have too many git branches and like many people I developed a convoluted script to show me the most recent ones. I ran this command many times a day for years:
699
Cloning a Sennheiser BA2015 battery pack
I generally avoid messing with Li-ion battery packs, but these are both Ni-mh and expensive.
700
701
How to store a chess position in 26 bytes (2022)
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
702
A Critique of GPUI
Personal Notes
703
My I3-Emacs Integration
tiling window managers are wonderful. ultra-flexible text editors are also wonderful. for a spell, i thought i'd found the ideal solution in exwm … and i think it would have been, save for the fact that i use ordinary, graphical windows as much, if not more than, text buffers, and sometimes those windows are from…
704
705
Splitting a Git Commit
It will ask you hunk by hunk for the things to include in the first commit, and then bring up the editor for the first and second commit message. It couldn’t be simpler than that.
706
A Recipe for Steganogravy
how to hide juicy data in plain sight
707
Your code is fast if you're lucky
Recently, while working on an optimized Quicksort implementation, I came across a rather interesting quirk. Modern compilers (especially Clang) optimize loops using fast, branch-free instructions - provided you use the right programming style.
708
Stealing from Biologists to Compile Haskell Faster
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
709
I built a programming language using Claude Code
Over the course of four weeks in January and February, I built a new programming language using Claude Code. I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that. You can find the source code on GitHub , along with build instructions and example programs .
710
If I could make my own GitHub
My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third wife has a skincare
711
Your C is not standard C
this is an incomplete list of some incompatibilities between c as it's written in the standard and c as it exists in the real world for people who use gcc/clang + glibc/musl.
712
Agent-to-agent pair programming
What if you could let Claude and Codex work together as pair programmers, talking to each other directly? One of them as the main worker and the other as a reviewer.
713
z386: An Open-Source 80386 Built Around Original Microcode
This is the fifth installment of the 80386 series . The FPGA CPU is now far enough along to run real software, and this post is about how it works. z386 is a 386-class CPU built around the original Intel microcode, in the same spirit as z8086 .
714
Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
715
Static Allocation, Constant Work
In reply to this email:
716
Retrofitting JIT Compilers into C Interpreters
C interpreters are a common language implementation technique and the basis for the reference implementations of languages such as Lua, Ruby, and Python. Unfortunately, C interpreters are slow, especially compared to language implementations powered by JIT compilers. In this post I’m going to show that it is possible…
717
Memory safety absolutists
When seeing the title of this post, I bet in some people's minds, the first thought was "Rust devs!". This connection is not unfounded. Rust devs tend to be passionate about memory safety. Some of it, I'm sure, may have been caused by a classic language wars attitude: my language is better than yours, and here is why…
718
719
Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot
Enjoy Emacs and its built-in language server (LSP) superpowers, for JVM languages. Let's walk through basic language setups, specialized workspace configuration handling, and dive deep into some advanced JSON-RPC and advice-based workarounds for Scala (Metals) and Kotlin that make development truly seamless from Emacs…
720
What I love about Django
The best parts of Django are the ones you stop noticing — a tour of the abstractions that have given Buttondown the most leverage over the years.