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Building a Mac app with Claude code
How I built Context—a native macOS SwiftUI app for debugging MCP servers—almost entirely with Claude Code, and what I learned about building with AI coding agents.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
752
Should LLMs just treat text content as an image?
Several days ago, DeepSeek released a new OCR paper. OCR, or “optical character recognition”, is the process of converting an image of text — say, a scanned…
753
Implementing LLaMA3 in 100 Lines of Pure Jax
Hi, welcome to my website! This is where I share my thoughts on things that interest me, mostly tech, philosophy, history, and math.
754
Four Years of Jai (2024)
I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and Delphi, through Java…
755
JVM exceptions are weird: a decompiler perspective
Some time ago, I played around with decompiling Java class files in a more efficient manner than traditional solutions like Vineflower allow. Eventually, I wrote an article on my approach to decompiling control flow, which was a great performance boost for my prototype. At the time, I believed that this method can be…
756
Getting decent error reports in Bash when you're using 'set -e'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
757
Evolution of Rust Compiler Errors
Blog about programming stuff.
758
Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
I love C. I could give you rational reasons for that. Like the fact that it works everywhere and how it goes fast. But mostly I love C because when I write C I feel an intimate connection with my computer. To me, C has soul. In fact all my personal project are written in C, like the graphics rendering engines that I'm…
759
Configuration files are user interfaces
We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it! You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be…
760
Garbage collection is useful
A long time ago, I spent a few years working on garbage collection in the J9 Java VM. 1 And even though I’ve since done mostly done higher-level stuff, having a deeper knowledge of GC has continued to come in useful.
761
Pipelining in psql (PostgreSQL 18)
the psql client version 18 comes with pipelining, which can speed up client-server communication. In this post, let's see how it works and how much can be g...
762
Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages
The neuroscience of why we make million dollar decisions based on identity, not data.
763
How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)
For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network…
764
The Whole App is a Blob
Building a Tamagotchi-style language learning iOS app with SwiftUI character animation - on drill design, motivation loops, and where Duolingo gets it wrong.
765
Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)
DevOps Engineer and Full-Stack Developer with 4+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and scalable web applications.
766
LSP client in Clojure in 200 lines of code
I wrote a small LSP client, it was kinda neat so I’m sharing it
767
A production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
768
Strong Eventual Consistency – The Big Idea Behind CRDTs
Missing the Forest for the Sequence Trees.
769
A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements
You can use CSS to add some simple functionality to HTML <dialog> elements!
770
Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity?
The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids each day - not from stone, but from code. Yet despite far more advanced tools, these systems don’t always make the experience better. So why, when KISS (Keep It…
771
Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat
libexpat is a fast streaming XML parser. Alongside libxml2, Expat is one of the most widely used software libre XML parsers written in C, specifically C99. It is cross-platform and licensed under the MIT license .
772
Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
OOXML is less an act of sabotage than the continuation of a flawed, inelegant lineage.
773
The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)
About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world... Plus a `glibc`…
774
An Interactive Guide to Rate Limiting
Learn about rate limiting algorithms with interactive apps, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Fixed Window, and Sliding Window methods
775
Implementing Forth in Go and C
I first ran into Forth about 20 years ago when reading a book about designing embedded hardware . The reason I got the book back then was to actually learn more about the HW aspects, so having skimmed the Forth chapter I just registered an "oh, this is neat" mental note and moved on with my life. Over the last two…
776
From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon
Implementing the famous donut.c animation in actual silicon using CORDIC and ray marching
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A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler
Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler
779
Yocto, RockPi and SBOMs: Building modern embedded Linux images
TLDR: I wanted to generate an up-to-date disk image for a Rock Pi 4 using Yocto that included CUPS and Docker to both get a better understanding of Yocto …
780
Patterns for Building Realtime Features
Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date. The features predominantly require sharing changes triggered by one user to other …