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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
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Go away Python
A blog post written by Lorentz Kinde. It's probably about something technical.
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So you want to parse a PDF?
Suppose you have an appetite for tilting at windmills. Let's say you love pain. Well then why not write a PDF parser today?
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Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models
A paper from Anthropic describing persona vectors and their applications to monitoring and controlling model behavior.
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How good engineers write bad code at big companies
Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t worked at a big company, it might be…
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I stopped everything and started writing C again
Welcome to kmx.io
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Your data model is your destiny
Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right.
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Igalia, Servo, and the Sovereign Tech Fund
Igalia is an open source consulting firm specialised in the development of innovative projects and solutions. Our engineers have expertise in a wide range of technological areas, including browsers and client-side web technologies, graphics pipeline, compilers and virtual machines. We have the most WPE, WebKit…
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Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
People keep asking me If I use Generative AI tools for coding and what I think of them, so this is my effort to put my thoughts in writing, so that I can send people here instead of having to repeat…
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Python on the Edge: Fast, sandboxed, and powered by WebAssembly
With AI workloads on the rise, the demand for Python support on WebAssembly on the Edge has grown rapidly. However, bringing Python to WebAssembly isn'...
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GPT-5-Codex
Codex just got faster, more reliable, and better at real-time collaboration and tackling tasks independently anywhere you develop—whether via the terminal, IDE, web, or even your phone.
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Things I would have told myself before building an autorouter
Important lessons from trying to build the world's fastest autorouter for about a year
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A Fast 64-Bit Date Algorithm (30–40% faster by counting dates backwards)
Counting years backwards unlocks faster speed. The first date algorithm to use only 4 multiplications, instead of 7+
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Pyrefly vs. Ty: Comparing Python's two new Rust-based type checkers
A deep dive into Meta's pyrefly and Astral's ty - two new Rust-based Python type checkers that both promise faster performance and better type inference.
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Advanced Python Features
A collection of advanced Python features that I've found interesting, underrated, or unique - as someone who's seen a lot of Python code.
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My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures
Hatching... Cursor Shenanigans Cursor, my beloved, started rate limiting shenanigans a few days back. For a good 2 weeks after June 16, 2025, we had almo...
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Code review can be better
Slightly unusual genre today: a negative result about our git-review tool for a different take on code review process, which we decided to shelve, at least for the time being.
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I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data
The target system was a distributed data processing platform that ran across hundreds of thousands of machines. At such scales, a 0.5% improvement would easily make up my salary going forward, and 2% was a good result for the half.
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So you wanna build a local RAG?
How to build a RAG system that's fully self-hosted.
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DrawAFish.com Postmortem
A blameful postmortem of how my viral HackerNews project got compromised by legacy passwords, missing auth, and the perils of vibe coding.
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Simulating water over terrain
If you don't want a long an boring introduction, skip directly to the virtual pipes method description . I will get a little bit sad if you do this, though x)
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Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
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Elixir 1.19
Elixir v1.19 released: type checking of protocols and anonymous functions, broader type inference, improved compile times, and more.
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OCaml as my primary language
A detailed explanation of why I chose OCaml as the ‘default’ programming language for every project.
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My approach to building large technical projects (2023)
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.
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Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025
Announcing AoCO 2025 - daily December posts about compiler optimisations