721
All your agents are going async
Agents used to be a thing you talked to synchronously. Now they’re a thing that runs in the background while you work. When you make that change, the …
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 968 posts.
722
Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol
tapo now logs in over the TPAP protocol, so the Third-Party Compatibility switch in the Tapo app can stay off. Also new: H200 and H500 camera hubs with recording downloads, and plug schedules and timers.
723
Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic
Most linux software just work on FreeBSD
724
Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
Back in November last year, I started a new job at Intercom, and one of the first projects I got to work on was improving the Intercom monolith CI with some of my new colleagues.
725
Disable Your SSH access accidentally with scp
Here's an interesting bug I ran into recently: After transferring some files to my server via scp, I couldn't log in via SSH anymore - my key was rejected by sshd.
726
C vs. C#: racing VLC's Gaussian blur
A real VLC video filter, ported line by line to C# and raced against the original C inside VLC 4, then optimized on both sides, with byte-identical output throughout.
727
Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
a static http server in aarch64 assembly
728
How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect
Measuring a commercial spatial audio processor, extracting its stereo impulse responses, and rebuilding the effect as a convolution filter on Linux.
729
What I did at Recurse Center
I spent the summer at Recurse Center, a programming retreat in Brooklyn, at the recommendation of my friend Cory. These are some things I did there.
730
Building an Advanced Agentic Harness
From a single pilot to an air campaign: planning, parallelism, memory, verification, and observability for production-shaped agents.
731
Whistler: Live eBPF Programming from the Common Lisp REPL
Writing, compiling, loading, and querying eBPF programs in one Lisp form.
732
Build a Deep Learning Library
Instead of just learning how to use a deep learning library, we are going to learn how to create one.
733
Crafting QR Codes: A deep dive into QR code art (2024)
An interactive explaination of how QR codes work and techniques for rendering artistic QR codes
734
735
LLMs could be, but shouldn't be compilers
I’ve been going round and round in my mind about a particular discussion around LLMs: are they really similar to compilers? Are we headed toward a world where people don’t look at the underlying code for their programs?
736
A bug which affected only left handed users
Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise…
737
How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users
Scaling is a complex topic, but after working at big tech on services handling millions of requests and scaling my own startup (AlgoMaster.io) from scratch, I’ve realized that most systems evolve through a surprisingly similar set of stages as they grow.
738
My Agent Setup
Personal website of Chad Arimura - My agent setup
739
Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V
Similar to the previous post, this post covers my analysis of a benchmark on RISC-V targets. Unlike the previous post, I was able to land a patch to eliminate the performance gap to GCC (for this benchmark)!
740
A new way to think about borrow checking (in reverse)
Have you ever had a weird idea, and then it worked, but you can't really believe it?
741
How to build a `Git diff` driver
How to write an external tool for `git diff` to delegate complex diffs to.
742
How JPEG works: Interactively explore JPEG's lossy compression methods
In the world of technology, “forever” means about 5 years. It’s humbling to think that the 1992 JPEG image standard is still going strong despite being more than 5 “forevers” old. Why has it been so successful? This article presents the key ideas behind JPEG in plain language and includes an interactive JPEG…
743
The cost YAGNI was never about
If you think YAGNI is about saving effort, cheap generation should retire it. It doesn't. Here's why.
744
Try Gleam
Why a Rust developer might feel at home in Gleam, and where the BEAM is a different world.
745
Anatomy of a Lean proof for software engineers
Intro I recently worked through a problem from a theory of computation textbook that asked me to prove a property of a language using finite automata. The informal proof is a simple constructive proof where you build an automaton and show that it recognizes the language. This is kind of similar to program…
746
Commit description as a thinking tool
Before the AI era, I wrote pretty long commit descriptions (or commit bodies) for major changes. It took me about five to ten minutes to draft and reread them to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I did that for several reasons.
747
Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after…
748
Opaque Types in Python
A proposed technique for exposing an opaque data structure with idiomatic modern Python.
749
Why is the first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?
Why is my first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?? It’s the ’emergency pool’ for exceptions, here’s how I uncovered it using GDB and digging through the source code of libstdc++, glibc and Valgrind!
750
Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete
Claim: as specified, the UTS #35 transliteration-rule language is Turing-complete. This is an exception in Unicode, where algorithms are deliberately bounded and always terminate. The specification defines a revisiting cursor with no rewrite limit. ICU's implementation implements a per-call cap, but the spec itself…