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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes
"Screenshots won't get you in", but Chrome DevTools will.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
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Cognitive load is what matters
There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.
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"We ran out of columns"
Oh the merchants2 table? Yeah, we ran out of columns on merchants, so we made merchants2
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How I ship projects at big tech companies
What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project
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An NFC movie library for my kids
When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangibl...
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After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
GraphQL is an incredible piece of technology that has captured a lot of mindshare since I first started slinging it in production in 2018. You won’t have to ...
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Greppability is an underrated code metric
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run. A collection of guidelines to keep your code base greppable
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We need visual programming. No, not like that
Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
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Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today
One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, …
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Building LLMs from the Ground Up: A 3-Hour Coding Workshop
If your weekend plans include catching up on AI developments and understanding Large Language Models (LLMs), I've prepared a 1-hour presentation on the development cycle of LLMs, covering everything from architectural implementation to the finetuning stages.
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Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
Pretend you have a really great programming day. You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don'...
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Coding My Handwriting
Coding my handwriting in Javascript - how I did it and what I’m doing with it.
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RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)
Date: March 7, 2111
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Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine"
How we designed xkcd's massive rube goldberg machine game in 3 weeks.
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Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
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You'll regret using natural keys
Beating another dead horse.
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Tony Hawk's Pro Strcpy
Tony Hawk's Pro Strcpy: A game save and RCE exploit for the Tony Hawk game series that can be used to hack Xbox, Playstation 2, Gamecube, and Xbox 360 consoles.
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My favourite Git commit (2019)
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
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Making a PDF that's larger than Germany
We’re gonna need a bigger printer.
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I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
Dmitry.GR: Everything you ever dreamed the RP2040 would be is here - fall in love with the RP2350
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The hunt for the missing data type
A (directed) graph is a set of nodes, connected by arrows (edges). The nodes and edges may contain data. Here are some graphs: All graphs made with graphviz (source) Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering: Package dependencies form directed graphs, as do module imports. The internet is a graph of links between…
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Local First, Forever
We explore how to build local-first sync on top of simple file storage
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Making a 3D modeler in C in a week
The origin story of a 3D Modeler made very quickly
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