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Making Graphics Like it's 1993
A deep dive into the asset creation pipeline for Catlantean 3D.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,529 posts.
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How LLMs work
A from-the-ground-up walkthrough of how modern LLMs work, from tokens to transformer blocks to the next-token loop
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“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
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Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
This post is part of my Programming for Advanced Beginners series. Subscribe now to receive specific, actionable ways to make your code cleaner, every other week, entirely free.
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From Node to Ruby on Rails
I learned to code in the Javascript stack [1] and am building a Javascript based product [2]. I never questioned this stack: many companies default to it, JS everywhere seems good, and the community is big. But for my new side project I decided to try Rails because despite some...
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Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
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A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics
For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, which has purchase links—paperback and ebook—and a preview of the first pages. You can see more snippets later in the book on the…
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How I make a living working on SerenityOS
This post describes in detail how I support myself while working on the SerenityOS project.
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Software Disenchantment (2018)
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.
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Developers don't understand CORS
The recent Zoom vulnerability is just one of many examples which show us that many developers do not understand how CORS works
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Zero-cost futures in Rust
One of the key gaps in Rust’s ecosystem has been a strong story for fast and productive asynchronous I/O . We have solid foundations, like the mio library, but they’re very low level: you have to wire up state machines and juggle callbacks directly.
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Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver
As a bit of background, one of my hobbies is helping people recover data from old tape cartridges, such as QIC-80 tapes, which were a rather popular backup medium in the 1990s among individuals, small businesses, BBS operators, and the like. I have a soft spot for tape media; there’s something about the tactile…
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A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...
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An interactive intro to CRDTs
CRDTs don't have to be all academic papers and math jargon. Learn what CRDTs are and how they work through interactive visualizations and code samples.
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If AI writes your code, why use Python?
For the last decade, fast-to-ship beat fast-to-run. Not anymore.
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We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying
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How I program with LLMs
This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working and I consider their…
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The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
Context Engineering is the new skill in AI. It is about providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time.
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CLI: Improved
I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line. As for me, I've been using the command line since 1997, first at university wh…
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PHP in 2019
PHP isn't the same old crappy language it was ten years ago
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If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right…
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Making Minecraft Spherical
Discover the unique design challenges of creating a spherical planet out of Minecraft-like blocks.
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The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
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On Being a Principal Engineer
The manager’s pathI bought and read The Manager’s Path by the awesome Camille Fournier when it first came out. At the time, I was a senior Database Engineer aspiring to become a principal engineer ...