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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 968 posts.
I can only speculate as to the reasons why I was laid off from Meta in May, but I suspect that one of the reasons is that I was a little bit more resistant to adopting AI/LLMs as coding tools than some of my peers. Don't get me wrong, I generated at least 90% of my code using AI in my last few months there, which was…
Meet G#: expressive data types, explicit nullability, and structured concurrency on .NET. Explore real examples and run your first project.
Curried functions are probably one of the first new things you come across if you go from an imperative language to a functional language. In purely functional languages, the convention is to define an n-parameter function inductively by staggering the parameters: applying the function to argument #1 returns a…
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…
A signals-and-noise course left me writing Monte Carlo math on paper and wishing the notation itself would run. Nine years later, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting, NoiseLang became a real Monte Carlo language that runs the same fused kernel on the GPU, on every CPU core, and on WebAssembly.
The FPGA 386 core I've been building now boots DOS, runs applications like Norton Commander, and plays games like Doom. On DE10-Nano it currently runs at 75 MHz. With the core now far enough along to run real software, this seems like a good point to step back and look at one of the 80386's performance-critical…
I like using Vim to make ASCII art. I don't use any plugins; Vim already has a bunch of built-in features that are super useful for making ASCII art!
I’m writing this so you don’t slap your forehead like I almost did when I decided to run swap in production to absorb memory spikes.
An adventure in making a utility
Why fixing package managers is harder than it looks.
Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components
Emacs provides four useful status bars (mode-line, header-line, tab-bar, and tab-line), but each imposes different, inconsistent limits on multi-line layout, al...
This was a very old draft I’ve had sitting around for years. The recent discussions of new query languages like Acadia spurred me to revisit, revise, and publish this. I think one of the biggest causes of NoSQL is that… Continue reading →
AI agents address the remaining concerns with having your documentation alongside your code in version control
While Claude Code and Codex have significantly accelerated the automation of software development, limitations in the context window of a…
c’mon, try doing a breakthrough
What would have happened if Emacs' default buffer had been a terminal emulator? Conceptually, from the outside, it would be perceived as a terminal…
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.
I’ve forgotten how to write code, or at least I think I have. Hard to be sure, I haven’t done it for a while. But then, I start to muse…
Comparing token efficiency across 19 popular programming languages using RosettaCode data - from Clojure to C, there's a 2.6x difference.
Slop, Alienation, Deskilling, and Team Fallout
People pick languages differently with LLMs.
My new book guides you through the start-to-finish build of a real world web application in Go — covering topics like how to structure your code, manage dependencies, create dynamic database-driven pages, and how to authenticate and authorize users securely .
My two-year-old son used a Brio wooden train set to explain constraint solving to his silly Dada.
New with expressions, type-safe error checking, and faster everything.
“When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door”— Grateful Dead, “Uncle John’s Band”
Many people, including myself, have implemented garbage collection (GC)libraries for Rust. Manish Goregaokar wrote up a fantastic survey of thisspace a few y...
