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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
UPDATE MARCH 2025: This post, and the template attached, were written for Typst v 0.11 – Typst has upgraded twice since then, and this template will not work with the newer versions of Typst. Please see the new post (Mar 26, 2025) at A New Typst Template for Pandoc
Many years ago, Kragen complained about the implementation and performance of Java regexes , and suggested that an implementation that emitted JVM bytecode could perform better. It's been a minute, but I'm happy to report that complaining on the Internet has served its purpose.
For the past months I’ve been keeping a list of things I encountered in PHP that I’ve found to be problematic, or in other words things that annoy me.
An investigation into the internals of Sidekiq, one of the most popular Ruby background job processors.
Last time we counted CPU instructions, let’s look at syscalls now!
The personal website of JT Archie. Includes a blog, work ethic, and projects they have worked on.
As a side-quest I recently decided to write a branchless utf8 decoder utilizing the pext or "parallel extract" instruction. It's compliant with rfc-3629 , meaning that it doesn't just naively decode the code-point but also checks for overlong encoding, surrogate pairs and such. Compiled with gcc -O3 -march=x86-64-v3…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometimes write functions that work across an enormous range of types, and are left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say…
A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
Design patterns are these cool things that make you go 'hell yeah' because they make a certain problem easier to deal with. Whether it's applicable to all languages, or due to a language constraint, they're pretty nice. Of course, some people go crazy with them rather than doing the simple thing that works. Other…
Teenagers' hands are the devil's playthings.
It's fairly common to use git repositories as a vehicle for serving websites. The webdev pushes their changes to some branch of a publicly available git repository, and some web server somewhere serves the current tip of that branch as the website. Github Pages would be the most famous example of this.
Laurent Le Brun's blog
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Lots of underrated areas to work on
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they're really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they want to answer question Y even though what someone asks is question X. I've seen...
A few years ago, I read The Toyota Way, driven by my curiosity about the origins of Agile software development. However, I became even more…
A short explanation of what is preemption and how it works
If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypothetical functional programming language called Gooby. In these discussions, often someone…
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
(Discussion on HackerNews)
Why I don't do Domain Driven Design
