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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly , but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about…
The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages.
My blog, mostly about programming
Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.
A 360M model that pretends to be a terminal, and remembers what you did
Specifications do not address the limitations of agentic coding
Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you’ll understand why this list exists. A collection of shell tricks-grouped by what works everywhere and what’s Bash/Zsh-speci...
Arhan's Blog
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
Bad software is a choice you make
every time i do, i feel bad for the poor person having to use it (especially if that person is me!). a plain list of bytes makes it hard to notice interesting things in the data. go ahead, try to find the single c0 in these bytes:
In reply to an email asking about learning software design skills as a researcher physicist:
There is a profound tension here: english specifications intuitively feel precise until you learn better from bitter experience. (It's all in that facial expression of the last frame.)
In Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner made the following claim: Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on …
You can ignore files in .gitignore, .git/info/exclude, and ~/.config/git/ignore
Thesis: reliable agents tackling complex tasks need deterministic control flow encoded in software, not increasingly elaborate prompt chains If you’ve eve...
An agent harness is a piece of software that provides an environment for an AI model to operate within.
A gallery that collects architecture figures from The Big LLM Architecture Comparison and related articles, with fact sheets and links back to the original sections.
Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!
I don’t like people adding tracking stuff to URLs. Still less do I like people adding tracking stuff to my URLs.
TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool's shortcomings and reselling them as a "puzzle game" which is "fun" to solve.I don't want my tools to be "fun". I want my tools to be invisible.Text…
Stop looking at Xcode. It's not fun. Unless it is! In which case, do it!
Good software knows what problem it solves and what needs to be tackled by another tool
How Pi's minimal harness improves coding-agent cost and performance, with examples from Databricks and Shopify's pi-autoresearch extension.
VideoLAN announces dav2d, an open source AV2 decoder — continuing the work started with dav1d for AV1.
jj is the name of the CLI for Jujutsu . Jujutsu is a DVCS, or "distributed version control system." You may be familiar with other DVCSes, such as git , and this tutorial assumes you're coming to jj from git .
Minimal container images often ship without curl, wget, or any HTTP client at all. Bash can open a TCP socket through /dev/tcp, which is enough to write a tiny HTTP/1.1 request by hand for quick checks.
Despite what I said in April , I'm still using coding assistants on my personal projects.
