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Dynamically patch a Python function's source code at runtime
written by Eric J. Ma on 2025-08-23 | tags: python runtime llm security namespace compilation execution functions toolbot monkeypatching
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
812
How to slow down a program and why it can be useful
Making programs slower can be useful to find...
813
Zig Error Patterns
Although I try to make good use of the debugger, I am quite used to print-based debugging, especially for unit tests. I wanted to explore some tricks to improve print-based debugging, and also incorporate the debugger more.
814
Discovering a JDK Race Condition, and Debugging It in 30 Minutes with Fray
Discovering a JDK Race Condition, and Debugging it in 30 Minutes with Fray I’ve been adding more integration tests for Fray recently. To ensure Fray can handle different scenarios, I wrote many creative test cases. Many of them passed as expected, while some failures led to epic fixes in Fray. Then something…
815
Running GPT-2 in WebGL: Rediscovering the Lost Art of GPU Shader Programming
A few weeks back, I implemented GPT-2 using WebGL and shaders (Github Repo) which made the front page of Hacker News. Here is a short write-up over what I …
816
What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway
An explainer for people who don't know computer science and are mildly curious
817
Curate your shell history
You can make your shell history more useful by removing the typos and false starts.
818
Crates.io phishing attempt
Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack. It’s turn for crates.io, the main public repository for Rust crates (packages). The phishing e-mail looks like this: And it leads to a GitHub login pa...
819
LLM codegen go brrr – Parallelization with Git worktrees and tmux
If you're underwhelmed with AI coding agents or simply want to get more out of them, give parallelization a try. After seeing the results firsthand over the past month, I'm ready to call myself an evangelist. The throughput improvements are incredible, and I don't feel like I'm losing control of the codebase.
820
A first look at Django's new background tasks
Django 6.0 introduces a built-in background tasks framework in `django.tasks`. But don't expect to phase out Celery, Huey or other preferred solutions just yet.
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0+0 > 0: C++ thread-local storage performance
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
822
The death of thread per core
Programming language async runtimes are very focused on handling asynchronous, possibly long running tasks, that might yield for a variety of reasons, that...
823
A Common Lisp jq replacement
Title says it all, I seriously dislike jq 's convoluted, impossible-to-remember ad hoc DSL that instantly joined heaps of misery like CMake and gnuplot in my heart. It should really have been a library with a CLI wrapper around eval in a well-known scripting language like Python.
824
Why WinQuake exists and how it works
When I took a look at the history of Quake binaries, they all made sense to me. quake.exe was the original release, able to run on DOS and Windows 95. Then came vquake.exe to support the hardware accelerated chip Vérité 1000. Later, glquake.exe generalized hardware acceleration to any vendor providing OpenGL drivers…
825
I built my own CityMapper
We've all used a public transit router to find a quick route from A to B, such as Google Maps or CityMapper, but how do they actually work?
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Parameterized types in C using the new tag compatibility rule
C23 has a new rule for struct, union, and enum compatibility finally appearing in compilers starting with GCC 15, released this past April, and Clang later this year. The same struct defined in different translation units (TU) has always been compatible — essential to how they work. Until this rule change, each such…
828
A deep dive into Rust and C memory interoperability
An in-depth exploration of what happens when Rust and C memory allocators collide, featuring crash analysis.
829
You're missing your near misses
FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport – NPR, Jan 30, 2025 The amount of attention an incident gets is proportional to the severity of the incident: the greater the impact to the organizat…
830
Learn you Galois fields for great good (2023)
This is the introduction to a series on Abstract Algebra. In particular, our focus will be on Galois Fields (also known as Finite Fields) and their applications in Computer Science. This is a project I've been excited about for many years now, but have been too busy to dedicate the adequate effort to meet my…
831
Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language"
[5 min read] The question Sheon Han poses — “Is Ruby a serious programming language?” — says a lot about what someone thinks programming is supposed to fee...
832
A Look at Rust from 2012
Recently I was scrolling through brson’s Rust quote database and stumbled upon a link to the official Rust tutorial from the very beginning of 2013. It says Rust 0.6 in the corner, but it lists many things that were removed in 0.6, so it’s likely closer to 0.5. I heard tales of old Rust before, but not of how the…
833
Coding agent in 94 lines of Ruby
“It’s not that hard to build a fully functioning, code-editing agent.” Thorsten Ball
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The Sudoku Affair
Software design is a deliberate process, and requires deliberate effort.
836
Building a Firecracker-Powered Course Platform to Learn Docker and Kubernetes
The iximiuz Labs origin story: five years of technical blogging followed by six months of active development resulted in an online learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineers.
837
Resizable structs in Zig
In this post I will make the case for the concept of a “runtime resizable struct” in Zig. I will then design an API by exploiting Zig’s powerful comptime functionality.
838
Building a Personal Archive with Hoarder
How to self-host a personal archive of web content even if stuff get's taken down
839
8086 Microcode Browser
Since releasing 486Tang , I’ve been working on recreating the 8086 with a design that stays as faithful as possible to the original chip. That exploration naturally led me deep into the original 8086 microcode — extracted and disassembled by Andrew Jenner in 2020.
840
We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
Lockfiles are an absolutely unnecessary concept that complicates things without a good reason. Dependency managers can and are working without it just the same.