121
The Emacsification of Software
Everything looks like Emacs now: personal, complicated, idiosyncratic, and shrink-wrapped around exactly what you want it to do. Does shipping software even make sense in the long run?
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
122
Agentic Coding Is a Trap
Remaining vigilant about cognitive debt and atrophy.
123
The git history command
Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so …
124
Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
Customize the look and feel of tmux
125
Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel
Table of Contents Intro Contest in short Problem intro Why this problem is auto-research-able Learning Enough to Ask Better Questions (Optional) Math f...
126
Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
I have been interested in machine-assisted ways to do and teach mathematics from as far back as 1999, when I started coding several applets in Java 1.0, both for my complex analysis and linear alge…
127
I switched from VSCode to Zed
For many years VSCode has been my day-to-day IDE for everything: Python, Go, C, occasional frontend development, and what not. It was never...
128
Native all the way, until you need text
Why building a rich, selectable, streaming Markdown chat UI on macOS still pushes you toward WebKit or Electron.
129
'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens
Kevin Patel - Application Security Engineer @ NISC
130
ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was …
131
PostgreSQL for Everything
You need simplicity if you want to move fast. PostgreSQL can very well replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse and Elastic. And many successful companies are doing exactly that. Let's check out how.
132
I'm sorry, but you still have to think
DHH, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, decided to rewrite Campfire Once from Ruby on Rails to Rust. Or rather ask a clanker to do it for him, as he can't stand reading or writing the Rust code himself. After that he added rewrites in other languages , like Elixir and Go.
133
When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
I’m going to make a bold claim: MCP is already dying. We may not fully realize it yet, but the signs are there. OpenClaw doesn’t support it. Pi doesn’t support it. And for good reason.
134
Why I love NixOS
Why I love NixOS is really about the Nix package manager, reproducibility, and sane system management in the LLM coding era.
135
Give Django your time and money, not your tokens
The Django community wants to collaborate with you, not a facade of you.
136
137
Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way?
138
Stop Making TUIs
It's time to stop drawing user interfaces with punctuation characters. Native UI is a completely solved problem.
139
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
The current state of app bloat.
140
Wake up! 16b
Released at the Outline Demoparty in May 2026, Ommen, NL An exploration of algorithmic density in 16 bytes of x86 assembly.
141
Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines
It's that time of the year again, a new version of Python is just around the corner. With the Python 3.15.0b1 feature freeze, we know what's...
142
Lines of code got a better publicist
A case against measuring AI-assisted engineering by code volume and other vanity metrics instead of outcomes.
143
I paid people to try and follow my README
Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a…
144
Street Fighter II, the World Warrier (2021)
This article is part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
145
AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.
146
Python numbers every programmer should know
A cheat sheet of real-world timing and memory numbers to guide performance-sensitive decisions.
147
Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code. If you have used any of these tools in the past year, you have probably experienced something like this: you ask the model to fix a simple bug (perhaps a single…
148
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.
149
Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
Why AI can make software development faster without replacing the judgment and understanding needed to build consistently good software.
150
C++26 Disapproved
On October 23, 2026, the unthinkable happened. It was supposed to be a mere formality: C++26 was up for a vote by the ISO National Bodi...