10801
The HTML video element needs to go back on the drawing board
The HTML standard doesn’t provide web authors the tools required to embed small video files in a screen and bandwidth responsive way. This needs to change.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
10802
In defence of SQL
SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.
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In Praise of Perl 5
I have decided to do a two-part series here praising Perl in part 1 and PostgreSQL in part 2. I expect that PostgreSQL folks will get a l...
10806
10807
AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering
AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering. A talk at UC Irvine, October 2026. Video and slides.
10808
Code vs. No-code
There was a conversation on Twitter this week that helped to clarify my thinking about something, and I wanted to share. There is a sort of tension between “code” and “no-code” (sometimes “low-code”) solutions. People who consider themselves software developers see people trying to use no-code solutions to do things…
10809
Excessive nil pointer checks in Go
Let’s talk about nil pointer checks in Go. You want to prevent panics in production, but that doesn’t start with a deferred recover. It starts with defensive programming. Check your inputs, check your bounds, and check pointers for nil before dereferencing them. I’ve started to see more nil checks in Go code. In the…
10810
Cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C
Following up from the last post, there is a lot more we need to cover. This was intended to be the post where we talk exclusively about benchmarks and numbers. But, I have unfortunately been perfectly taunted and status-locked,
10811
How Chordcat works – a chord naming algorithm
chordcat is a chord-naming application and a pet project of mine. It is written in C++ and SFML.
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10813
The cost of dynamic vs. static dispatch in C++
A couple of years ago I wrote an article about the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern in C++ , focusing on the motivation behind it and how to implement it.
10814
Swift Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Pictures
In this port to Swift of the great of Haskell's "Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures" we are going to look at these functional programming concepts aided by some very helpful pictures.
10815
GitHub Copilot: First Impressions
A glimpse of the upcoming paradigm shift in how we do development
10816
Oil Shell: Success with Aboriginal, Alpine, and Debian Linux
Three months ago, in Roadmap #5 , I wrote that OSH will be a better shell for building Linux distributions . It will run existing code, including bash scripts, but it's stricter and easier to debug.
10817
Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of…
10818
What's wrong with the default build tool for Scala
SBT is the default build tool for the Scala programming community: you can build Scala using other tools, but the vast majority of the community uses SBT. Despite that, nobody seems to like SBT: people say it's confusing, complicated, and opaque. This post will deeply analyze what exactly it is about SBT that people…
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10821
Exploring biphasic programming: a new approach in language design
I’ve noticed a small but interesting trend in the programming languages space. I’m not sure how novel it is, but this pattern, which I’ll refer to as “biphasic programming,” is characterized by languages and frameworks that enable identical syntax to express computations executed in two distinct phases or environments…
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10823
Creating a Slack app that uses fewer resources
I recently created a macOS app called Slack Lite, which beats Slack's desktop app across a few performance metrics. Slack Lite uses Slack's official UI, so it's visually indistinguishable from the official client. Even so, Slack Lite uses 5x fewer threads, 3.5x less time to startup, and significantly less CPU. In the…
10824
CHIP-8 in Common Lisp: The CPU
A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles . I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once:
10825
Code's Worst Enemy
If you could snap your fingers and bring Perl 6 on Parrot's implementation up to the level of Rhino's, would you still choose JavaScript?
10826
My (Neo)Vim workflow
A guy decides to show off his Neovim setup.
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10829
Folia – Multithreading Coming to your Minecraft server
A news post talking about PaperMC's newest project, Folia!
10830
Mutation Driven Testing: When TDD Just Isn’t Good Enough
As someone who loves discussing Software Craftsmanship and best practices, Test Driven Development (TDD) is a bit of a sore spot for me. Let me start off by saying that I love TDD’s emphasis on tes…