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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.

2025
307

The Case Against PGVector

The real limitations of pgvector in production: index choice between IVFFlat and HNSW, why real-time search is hard, pre- vs post-filtering pain, how performance degrades at scale, and when a dedicated vector database is the better call.

312

Django: what’s new in 6.0

Django 6.0 was released today, starting another release cycle for the loved and long-lived Python web framework (now 20 years old!). It comes with a mosaic of new features, contributed to by many, some of which I am happy to have helped with. Below is my pick of highlights from the release notes.

316

PyTorch Monarch

We now live in a world where ML workflows (pre-training, post training, etc) are heterogeneous, must contend with hardware failures, are increasingly asynchronous and highly dynamic. Traditionally, PyTorch has relied...

321

Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community

I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree. I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back…

324

Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Built on WireGuard®️, Tailscale enables you to make finely configurable connections, secured end-to-end according to zero trust principles, between any resources on any infrastructure.

327

Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust

Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…