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Can gzip be a language model?
A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
152
USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers
A basic introduction to USB for people that don't need to know what happens on the wire
153
Fable 5.2 one-shotted my nephew's dream game
LLMs can make complete multi-level games that are fun.
154
Visual introduction to PyTorch
An easy to follow, visual introduction to PyTorch.
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Emacs appearances in pop culture
Thank you for the support, this blog post got featured on the front page of Hacker News (YCombinator).
156
Bug Blindness
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work , but most people I talk to don't see anything like this . For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that…
157
Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Code
LM Studio 0.4.0 introduced llmster and the lms CLI. Here is how I set up Gemma 4 26B for local inference on macOS that can be used with Claude Code.
158
Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
Is your vibe-coded app a Crapject or a Gift?
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A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway
I've written more shell scripts than I can count, but I still stumble upon tricks that honestly blow my mind far too often than I care to admit. Latest thing that blew my head clean off? The shell colon.
161
Go Concurrency Distilled
Interactive mini-book on concurrent programming in Go.
162
Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
Exploring the chardet v7.0.0 controversy: Can an AI rewrite legally 'launder' a library from LGPL to MIT?
163
Mythical Man Month
a bliki entry for Mythical Man Month
164
Claude Code VS Code extension with backdoor released on Cursor marketplace
Yesterday, Anthropic were compromised and used to stage a global supply chain attack.
165
Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
AI agents are getting very good at finding vulnerabilities in large-scale software systems.
166
LLVM: The bad parts
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR . Since then, one of these issues has been fixed fully (opaque pointers migration), one has been mostly fixed (constant expression removal), and one is well on the way towards being fixed (ptradd migration).
167
The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
If we think writing code is dead, and AI is generating all codebases, I still think the bigger problem is people or full teams not knowing anything anymore about the system...
168
I am happier writing code by hand
I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code…
169
I love software rendering
Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage. Why I still prefer the software renderer, and why it needs a fast PC.
170
Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day—the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant …
171
Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Writing code is cheap now
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
173
Missile defense is NP-complete
Exploring the Weapon-Target Assignment problem: how missile defense connects to NP-completeness, SSPK probability calculations, and how saturation attacks exploit computational limits.
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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
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A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
177
A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
SSH port forwarding explained in a clean and visual way. How to use local and remote port forwarding. What sshd settings may need to be adjusted. How to memorize the right flags.
178
An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re…
179
Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish
I tried to use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 to implement a connector between Youtube Music and opensubsonic. The end result was a fairly short amount of time to get a working project.
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Agent Skills
AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skill...