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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
The target system was a distributed data processing platform that ran across hundreds of thousands of machines. At such scales, a 0.5% improvement would easily make up my salary going forward, and 2% was a good result for the half.
How to build a RAG system that's fully self-hosted.
A blameful postmortem of how my viral HackerNews project got compromised by legacy passwords, missing auth, and the perils of vibe coding.
If you don't want a long an boring introduction, skip directly to the virtual pipes method description . I will get a little bit sad if you do this, though x)
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
A detailed explanation of why I chose OCaml as the ‘default’ programming language for every project.
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.
Announcing AoCO 2025 - daily December posts about compiler optimisations
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I hate disqus too much.
I announce Xee, the implementation of XPath and XSLT in Rust that I've been working on for the last two years.
You see a series of checkboxes checked. Schedules met. Requirements satisfied. Demos delivered. It's a good day. Good job, you, good job! A promotion is in sight.
The real limitations of pgvector in production: index choice between IVFFlat and HNSW, why real-time search is hard, pre- vs post-filtering pain, how performance degrades at scale, and when a dedicated vector database is the better call.
The Story Behind 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Moving on from a toy self-attention mechanism, it's time to find out how to build a real trainable one. Following Sebastian Raschka's book 'Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)'. Part 8/??
Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small changes. Practice specific skills.
Django 6.0 was released today, starting another release cycle for the loved and long-lived Python web framework (now 20 years old!). It comes with a mosaic of new features, contributed to by many, some of which I am happy to have helped with. Below is my pick of highlights from the release notes.
Introduction Over the last decade, when working on databases with UUID Version 41 as the primary key data type, these databases have usually had bad performance and excessive IO. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4122#section-4.4 ↩
A security research blog.
Hello there! If you follow tech news, you might have heard about the Okta security incident that was reported on 1st of November. The TLDR of the incident was …
In December of 2012, I was home for Christmas, reading Hacker News. And that’s when I saw “ Rust 0.5 released ."" I’m a big fan of programming languages, so I…
It's easier than you think to write an exceptional software tutorial. You can stand out in a sea of mediocre guides by following a few simple rules.
What is a Banana Curving Machine? Well it's a fantastic apparatus that does what it says. Curves Bananas.
tl;dr: On Unix-like platforms, if you use git clone --recursive on an untrusted repo, it could achieve remote code execution. Update to a fixed version of Git and other software that embeds Git (including GitHub Desktop).
I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree. I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back…
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
it's not working
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
Part 7 of my software journey, getting to know developer experience.
