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I fixed Windows native development
Imagine you’re maintaining a native project. You use Visual Studio for building on Windows, so you do the responsible thing and list it as a dependency
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,529 posts.
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RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)
Date: March 7, 2111
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Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?
Most coders want AI to write code faster: I want AI to write FASTER CODE.
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Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this
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Code is run more than read
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
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I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues
I wanted a way to have physical tickets from GitHub in front of me. One Epson printer, a Raspberry Pi, and some PHP later, I had a working system in place.
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MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Or: The Day My Toaster Started Taking Phone Calls
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Computer Graphics from Scratch
Behind the beautiful imagery of the latest animated movie and the realistic environments of popular videogames lie some mysterious algorithms. Computer Graphics from Scratch aims to demystify these algorithms and shows you that computer graphics can be surprisingly simple.
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Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
Every ops team has some manual procedures that they haven’t gotten around to automating yet. Toil can never be totally eliminated. Very often, the biggest toil center for a team at a growing …
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Software Architecture Guide
Software Architecture is the important aspects of a software system's internal design, usually its major components and aspects that are hard to change.
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Jemalloc Postmortem
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
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Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
While I was leading PKC’s security practice, we did probably 20-30 code security audits, almost of all of them for startups that were just around their Series A or B (that was usually when they had cash and realized that it’d be good to take a deeper look at their security, after the do-or-die focus on product market…
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An easter egg for one user: Luke Skywalker
A few weeks ago a user on my site, cardgames.io , sent me a message saying that Mark Hamill had just tweeted a photo of himself playing Yahtzee . I looked, and sure enough, there it was:
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Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil , the Excalidraw font.
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Cursorless is alien magic from the future
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
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New Grad vs. Senior Dev
A student who I used to tutor in CS occasionally sent me a meme yesterday which showed “NEW GRAD vs SENIOR DEVELOPER”; the new grad is all caps yelling NO! YOU CAN’T JUST USE BRUT…
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Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my …
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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
How we overvalue the wrong technology and novel aspects of interface design at the expense of substantial gains to our productivity.
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Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out
Git repositories seem like an elegant solution for package registry data. Pull requests for governance, version history for free, distributed by design. But as registries grow, the cracks appear.
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Simulating fluids, fire, and smoke in real-time
Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.
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Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml
During my final term at UWaterloo I took the CS444 compilers class with a project to write a compiler from a substantial subset of Java to x86, in teams of up to three people with a language of the group’s choice. This was a rare opportunity to compare implementations of large programs that all did the same thing…
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Let’s Build a Simple Database (2017)
Writing a sqlite clone from scratch in C
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Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash
Recently I wanted to deepen my understanding of bash by researching as much of it as possible. Because I felt bash is an often-used (and under-understood) technology, I ended up writing a book on it .
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Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…