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Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend
The one where I go crawling back.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,533 posts.
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Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion
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I/O Thoughts
This year was the first time I've attended the Google I/O conference, and it was a fascinating experience. As someone who is primarily an iOS developer and h...
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LogJ4 Security Inquiry – Response Required
On Friday January 21, 2022 I received this email. I tweeted about it and it took off like crazy. The email comes from a fortune-500 multi-billion dollar company that apparently might be using a product that contains my code, or maybe they have customers who do. Who knows? My guess is that they do this … Continue…
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What every computer programmer should know about floating point, part 1
Author’s note: this article used to be called “What Every ComputerProgrammer Should Know About Floating Point, part 1”. Some peoplenoted that this was perh...
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A Practical Introduction to Blockchain with Python
Adil Moujahid, Bridging Tech and Art
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The slow currentTimeMillis()
Today we’ll look at one of the most basic and the most often used methods from the Java library: System.currentTimeMillis() .
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Learning KVM – implement your own kernel
Few weeks ago I solved a great KVM escaping challenge from TWCTF hosted by @TokyoWesterns . I have given a writeup on my blog: [Write-up] T...
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Why Lisp?
A number of people have contacted me about a comment I wrote yesterday on Hacker News asking me to elaborate, e.g.: my impression is that...
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How I learned to program
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible…
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Memory-efficient enum arrays in Zig
Proper support for sum types or tagged unions have become table stakes for systems programming languages. However, they can incur a lot of memory fragmentation that's not trivial to avoid without good support for metaprogramming. This post goes into Zig's powerful comptime feature, and how it allows some radical…
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Never run ‘python’ in your downloads folder
Python can execute code. Make sure it executes only the code you want it to.
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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
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Git without a forge
I’ve written quite a lot of free software in my life. Most of it was from scratch: projects I started myself. So I get to choose where to host them – or rather, I have to choose where to host them.
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How to Learn Nix
It's like a Let's Play, but for obscure software documentation. I tried to learn Nix, and it was pretty hard. I kept a diary of every command I tried, every wrong assumption that I made, and every realization that I had along the way.
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Teaching GPT-3 to Identify Nonsense
In Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test, Kevin Lacker found that GPT-3 does well answering simple factual questions like “Who was president of the United States in 1955?”, but also happily answered absurd qu…
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From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures
A few months ago I was tasked with creating an internal tool for the company's engineers: a Chat that used a local LLM. Nothing extraordinary so far…
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One line you should add to every makefile
If you're using GNU make and you need help debugging a makefile then there's a single line your should add. And it's so useful that you sho...
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Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server
Notes from a backend dev who builds and runs his own infra. Go, microservices, blockchain, self-hosting, homelab projects.
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Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen
UPDATE: The contractor/vendor that made the software commented on Hacker News ...
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Lua is so underrated
Introduction The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so lit...
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Use GNU Emacs
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
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Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987
In a previous article I've done the 'Hello, world!' of GUIs in assembly: A black window with a white text, using X11 without any libraries, just talking directly over a socket.
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Node.js has jumped the shark
I've been trying to understand this whole Node.js thing that's been going on for the past few days. It's taught me a lot about how the Node....