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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 968 posts.
…symmetry isn’t just a preference for “pretty” shapes. Contents Introduction The HM-GM-AM-QM Inequality The two circles The Semicircle The Container The 3D container The Sum of Squares Inequality Nesbitt’s Inequality Conclusion Introduction While I was randomly browsing the web, I came across this nice picture: Roland…
RTK promises dramatic token savings for coding agents, but raw terminal compression is not the same as cheaper, safer, or more accurate software engineering.
This post is a rewrite of my earlier blog post from Nov 2023 with new insights and updates.
Domain separation bugs have bitten Bitcoin, Ethereum, TLS, and AWS. Snowpack solves this by embedding random domain separators directly in the IDL.
Writing code in 2D: a spatial programming language with vertical operands, quantum uncomputation puzzles, and a 3-bit adder in a single 2D expression.
Someone opened a PR to implement readahead in Turso. It was a throwaway implementation, but a good excuse to measure io_uring and understand more about it.
DeepSeek replaced standard residuals with massive Hyper-Connections, and then watched them explode. I reproduced the 9x signal amplification to understand their fix: the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. Part 1 of 2.
A 3.8B model pretrained from scratch to 0.384 CORE on 65B tokens in 43 hours, for $998.
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
I've spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far.
I didn’t want to buy a trampoline. It wasn’t the money.
Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier.Claude's load-bearing seams
If you have Chrome Canary installed with the 'Experimental Web Platform features' flag enabled, you can now try out a new HTML meta tag:
Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it given that the…
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here .
In Rust, one of the most common ways to implement core traits (like Debug , Display , and Clone ) is to #[derive(...)] them, e.g.:
A beginner's exploration of the many layers of Common Lisp development environments.
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
Two services running on the same machine. One of them opens a listening TCP socket bound to localhost, the other one connects to that. They exchange data. Every now and then , the service that initiated the connection gets an ECONNRESET while reading data from the socket -- but no other errors show up in the logs, no…
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
We usually learn that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 kilobytes, etc. But is this true or a kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
a guide to interactive rebasing.
ernesernesto dev blog
There is a misunderstanding about software engineering that AI is making increasingly visible: we tend to confuse writing code with building software.
I built an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory.
I built a tiny programming language where programs are candy grids, complete with a renderer, photo decoder, AST tree, and execution trace.
The author of Java 26's MemoryMXBean.getTotalGcCpuTime() analyzes the CPU-memory trade-off and why pause times fail to capture explicit GC cost.
On the March 10, 2025 episode of Do You Speak Tech?, I sat down with two names woven into the early fabric of modern computing: Larry Masinter and Frank
TLDR: Written version of the talk I gave at Develop Brighton 2026. Yes Godot can ship commercial VR, we paid roughly £80k in early adopter tax to do it. War stories from rebuilding Godot's core, the
