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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.

2024
331

JSON Patch

JSON Patch is a simple, efficient, and standardized way to apply partial updates to JSON documents, especially over HTTP. Learn how it works in production.

336

Seconds Since the Epoch

This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch , which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.

338

Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

Aerc is a TUI email client. It had its first release ~4 years ago. This makes it a “baby” compared to most of its “competitors” (Pine was released in 1992, Mutt in 1995). I heard about this program shortly after its first release but ignored it at the time, because I was still reasonably happy with Thunderbird and it…

341

Speeding up Ruby by rewriting C in Ruby

There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python. The repo author, @BenjDicken, created a fun visualization of each language’s performance. Here’s one of the visualizations, which shows Ruby as the third slowest…

350

The Rust calling convention we deserve

I will often say that the so-called “C ABI” is a very bad one, and a relatively unimaginative one when it comes to passing complicated types effectively. A lot of people ask me “ok, what would you use instead”, and I just point them to the Go register ABI , but it seems most people have trouble filling in the gaps of…

351

What's New in Neovim 0.10

Neovim 0.10 was the longest release cycle since the heady days of the 0.5 release. There are a ton of new features in this release (as well as some breaking changes), so be sure to check the full release notes. You can view the release notes directly in Nvim with :h news. The news file includes information on new…

353

I wrote a new JIT compiler for PostgreSQL

Sometimes, I don’t know why I do things. It’s one of these times. A few months ago, Python 3.13 got its JIT engine, built with a new JIT compiler construction methodology (copy-patch, cf. research paper ). After reading the paper, I was sold and I just had to try it with PostgreSQL. And what a fun ride it’s been so…

354

Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

A great amount of my writing on this site revolves around complaining about modern user interface design . Some people agree with me, some don't. Most probably don't care at all. That's fine. What I find interesting is that many (but not all!) people who disagree either present extremely specific non-argument nitpicks…