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Building an Advanced Agentic Harness
From a single pilot to an air campaign: planning, parallelism, memory, verification, and observability for production-shaped agents.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.
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Google Logo Ligature Bug
Jeffrey Yasskin recently pointed out an interesting security bug: The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users into thinking they were really interacting with Google. To see how…
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Eventual Business Consistency
Executive Summary of Bi-temporality
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How to make things slower so they go faster
In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align, e.g., after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or as a service returns from an outage, the bucketed arrival rate can
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Metaprogramming for madmen
This post is part of the series “Debris: Opening the box”. Okay, previous posts from this series aimed to actually convey useful technical information: assuming you actually want to wri…
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How to Build a Chess Engine and Fail
A Chess-AI is something every programmer should build at least once and [Sebastian Lague’s](https://www.youtube.com/@SebastianLague) [competition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iScy18pVR58) was the perfect opportunity for me to do so. Constrained to 1024 tokens I wanted to implement an evaluation function similar to…
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Lemma for the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory
This post illustrates a key lemma that is used in proving the fundamental theorem of Galois theory (FTGT). Note that FTGT is not covered in this post. The focus of this post is on understanding and proving this lemma only. Here is the lemma from the book Galois Theory , 5th ed. by Stewart (2023):
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Timeouts and cancellation for humans (2018)
Your code might be perfect and never fail, but unfortunately the outside world is less reliable. Sometimes, other people's programs crash or freeze. Networks go down; printers catch on fire . Your code needs to be prepared for this: every time you read from the network, attempt to acquire an inter-process lock, or…
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Heartbleed and Static Analysis
The issue with things like Frama-C is that they are by far the easiest to use if you start out a project using them, and you often don’t know which projects you retroactively wished you had done so until they are big and crufty.
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Anatomy of a Program in Memory
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
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Minesweeper in Clojure
As a fun experiment, and to show the basics of clojure development, I implemented a minesweeper clone using clojurescript and p5.js.
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Technical Debt Is Like Tetris
You can’t win. You can only control how quickly you lose.
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Python, Pitch Shifting, and the Pianoputer
Record a sound, change its pitch 50 times and assign each new sound to a key of your computer keyboard. You get a Pianoputer ! A sound can be encoded …
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Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
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Lessons from Building a Node App in Docker
Here are some tips and tricks that I learned the hard way when developing and deploying web applications written for node.js using Docker.
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Modular Errors in Rust
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:
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Hacking on Clang is surprisingly easy
Date: 2020-01-27 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00012-clang-compiler-hacking.md
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A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization
I recently went on a nice long SCUBA diving trip with my wife and daughters. Lots of diving implies lots of showers, and lots of showers means lots of shower-thoughts! [1] An especially interesting one I had turned into a nice way to visualize some aspects of the Collatz Conjecture.
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Writing Pong in Rust for My OS Written in Rust
This post is part of a larger effort you can view over here: https://osblog.stephenmarz.com .
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Catena: A time series storage engine written in Go
First, I suggest reading Baron’s “Time-Series Database Requirements” blog post to get some more context for this post. I read that and, as I usually do, had my mind set on low-level thoughts. I wrote the following comment:
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A New Book: Building Machine Learning Systems with Python
I wrote a book. Well, only in part. Willi Richert and I wrote a book. It is called Building Machine Learning Systems With Python and is now available from Amazon (or Amazon.co.uk), although it has …