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Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
Released in 2024, uv is hands-down the best tool for managing Python installations and dependencies. Here's why.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
After over two decades, players are now forbidden from flying a seaplane, all thanks to undefined code behavior.
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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists
At Soundslice, our sheet music scanner digitizes music from photographs, so you can listen, edit and practice. We continually improve the system, and I keep an eye on the error logs to see which images are getting poor results.
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How uv got so fast
uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.
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Apple's Software Quality Crisis
Tim, I think we are not cooking
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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
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Mr TIFF
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
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Next.js is infuriating
Hey, it's finally happened. I've decided to write a blog post. And if you're reading this, I've also finished one. I have wanted to do this for a long time,…
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Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code
PR by Xuan-Son Nguyen for llama.cpp: This PR provides a big jump in speed for WASM by leveraging SIMD instructions for qX_K_q8_K and qX_0_q8_0 dot product functions. Surprisingly, 99% of …
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Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
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Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver
As a bit of background, one of my hobbies is helping people recover data from old tape cartridges, such as QIC-80 tapes, which were a rather popular backup medium in the 1990s among individuals, small businesses, BBS operators, and the like. I have a soft spot for tape media; there’s something about the tactile…
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How I program with LLMs
This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working and I consider their…
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The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
Context Engineering is the new skill in AI. It is about providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time.
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Making Minecraft Spherical
Discover the unique design challenges of creating a spherical planet out of Minecraft-like blocks.
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Software development topics I've changed my mind on
Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade
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Modern Node.js Patterns
Node.js has undergone a remarkable transformation since its early days. If you’ve been writing Node.js for several years, you’ve likely witnessed this evolution firsthand—from the callback-heavy, CommonJS-dominated landscape to today’s clean, standards-based development experience.
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Introducing tmux-rs
A Rust port of tmux
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Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
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UTF-8 is a brilliant design
Exploring the brilliant design of UTF-8 encoding system that represents millions of characters while being backward compatible with ASCII
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No Graphics API
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.
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The <output> Tag
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Hey… quick question, why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
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Libghostty is coming
Over two years ago, in one of my first public talks about Ghostty , I shared my vision for libghostty : an embeddable library for any application to embed their own fully functional, modern, and fast terminal emulator. Libghostty is finally starting to take shape, and I'm excited to share more details about my plans…
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AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
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Writing toy software is a joy
Why you should write more toy programs
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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