241
What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
242
Microgpt explained interactively
Walk through Karpathy's 200-line GPT from scratch. Tokenize names into integers, watch softmax convert scores to probabilities, step through backpropagation on a computation graph, explore attention heatmaps, and see a tiny model learn to generate plausible names.
243
No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams
Sharing a reluctant, "node & postgres" approach to engineering management for early-stage startups
244
Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2
Here are three true statements about the game of Slay the Spire 2 (in single player): If you pick Neow's Bones in the Underdocks, the random curse is ~54% likely to be Debt.* It is impossible to receive Rebound from the Trash Heap event. Your first fight is 76% likely to drop a potion in Underdocks, and 4% likely to…
245
In praise of –dry-run
For the last few months, I have been developing a new reporting application. Early on, I decided to add a –dry-run option to the run command. This turned out to be quite useful – I have…
246
Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
Wolfram's Foundation Tool supplements LLM foundation models with deep computation and precise knowledge. CAG (computation-augmented generation) underlies multiple access methods.
247
But yak shaving is fun (2019)
KO | EN | Discussions on HN Alexandr frolov (CC BY-SA 4.0) This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in ...
248
The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python
A perceptron explained from scratch in Python, with interactive demos. Learn weights, bias, the decision boundary, epochs, learning rate, and why we normalize data.
249
Jira Is Turing-Complete
Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian's project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete . Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.
250
251
Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
252
Components of a Coding Agent
How coding agents use tools, memory, and repo context to make LLMs work better in practice
253
TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough
Each mini-demo below covers one concept used later. Skip the ones you already know.
254
255
The Slow Formation of Durable Software
How a group of historians took years to imagine Zotero, the research application that would eventually be used by millions
256
This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser
Not that long ago I became aware of Justine Tunney's cosmopolitan libc project. It's a toolkit that allows you to compile C source code into a single binary...
257
Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit. You can't polish a turd Omarchy 4.0 shipped with a collec...
258
Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
259
Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language
just a diary
260
Measuring the sloppiness of code
Exploring how to measure code sloppiness, why correct code can still erode a codebase, and why human intuition and taste still matter.
261
MCP is dead; long live MCP
Understanding the social media zeitgeist around CLIs and the premature death of MCP
262
Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If
Why a filter is slowest when it keeps half of random input, and what a branchless rewrite gains there and loses at 1%.
263
We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
Literate programming is the idea that code should be intermingled with prose such that an uninformed reader could read a code base as a narrative, and come away with an understanding of how it works and what it does. Although I have long been intrigued by this idea, and have found uses for it in a couple1 of different…
264
Perfection is not over-engineering
The industry conflates perfection with over-engineering. They're not the same. Over-engineering is solving the wrong problem; a perfect solution exists once the requirements are clear.
265
Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
My personal website, portfolio, and blog.
266
267
The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …
268
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
269
I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
270
The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate