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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,817 posts.
Yesterday, there was a blog post entitled "What the Hell is Happening to Rails" that stayed at the number one spot on Hacker News for quite a while. The post and many (but not most) the comments on the post reflect deep-seated concern about the recent direction of Rails.
An introduction to shell productivity features: autocompletion, keyboard shortcuts, history navigation and shell expansions.
This book, written by Protesilaos Stavrou, also known as ‘Prot’, provides a big picture view of the Emacs Lisp programming language.
This post describes four projects that share a common theme of enhancing or using generative models, a branch of unsupervised learning techniques in machine learning. In addition to describing our work, this post will tell you a bit more about generative models: what they are, why they are important, and where they…
I do not plan to write more of my deep learning articles on this site. Instead, I will be co-editor of Distill , a visual, interactive journal for machine learning research emphasizing human understanding. I believe this will allow me to better serve the community.
A new major version of Automerge, which cuts down memory usage by more than 10x while preserving backwards compatability.
I’ve been spending a bit of my time playing around with new languages — in particular, Rust has captured my imagination. The bulk of the…
There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis…
This is an announcement regarding the resolution of the syntax for the await operator in Rust. This is one of the last major unresolved questions blocking the stabilization of the async/await feature, a feature which will enable many more people to write non-blocking network services in Rust. This post contains…
Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having context in regards to what is actually being run by the CPU.
Most programmers agree that we don't read enough code. The interviews in Peter Seibel's book, “Coders at work” highlight a comical contradiction: almost all the programmers interviewed by Seibel recommend that others read code for fun, but none of them routinely do so themselves. Seibel even asked Hal Abelson (of SICP…
A summary of my undying love for LD_PRELOAD.
In early 2024, I began investigating collaborative editing systems for use in Moment ’s core text editor.
Running Elixir on Fly.io let me easily create a globally distributed, privately networked, clustered, multi-player game server! Here's how.
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code
I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep , my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts. These updates were motivated in part by a 10 week class I recently developed and taught at the School for Poetic Computation called Scrapism (web-scraping-as-art). The class includes a section on…
Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator. The code is here on github .
While working through the old posts in order to adjust the front matter (and sometimes more), I thought: Will this last? Or will this go south soon, like it did around with previous projects again? A recent reddit post reinforced this line of thought, so I decided to write down my thoughts on the issue.
I have changed my mind about some topics big and small so far in my life. Today: the value of types for programming.
Go’s new look and logo (don't worry, the mascot isn’t changing!).
How to run Claude Code with the `--dangerously-skip-permissions` flag in a safe way
Today everybody's doing AI code review. Here's how Greptile's viewpoint is differentiated - independence, autonomy, and feedback loops.
Premise The 0.4.0 release of uv does everything I currently do with pip, pyenv, pipx, pip-tools, and pipdeptree. Because of that, I'm in the process of switching to uv. This blog post covers switching
A practical about:config checklist to declutter Firefox right-click menus on macOS, disabling AI/chatbot prompts, link previews, OCR, visual search, and other low-value context menu items.
