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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,809 posts.
While I was leading PKC’s security practice, we did probably 20-30 code security audits, almost of all of them for startups that were just around their Series A or B (that was usually when they had cash and realized that it’d be good to take a deeper look at their security, after the do-or-die focus on product market…
A few weeks ago a user on my site, cardgames.io , sent me a message saying that Mark Hamill had just tweeted a photo of himself playing Yahtzee . I looked, and sure enough, there it was:
Why & how we rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil , the Excalidraw font.
Today, we’re announcing Flutter 2 : a major upgrade to Flutter that enables developers to create beautiful, fast, and portable apps for any platform. With Flutter 2, you can use the same codebase to ship native apps to five operating systems: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux; as well as web experiences…
.NET 5.0 includes many enhancements, including single file applications, more capable JSON APIs, new versions of C
Xe Iaso's personal website.
JavaScript's Date object has been a source of bugs for three decades. Temporal, which just reached Stage 4, is a modern replacement with immutable types, first-class time zone and calendar support, and nanosecond precision. This is the story of how Bloomberg, Igalia, and the TC39 community spent nine years turning…
Mat Ryer, principal engineer at Grafana Labs and host of the Go Time podcast, shares what he’s learned from more than a dozen years of writing HTTP services in Go.
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
Every SQL database engine works in roughly the same way: It first translates the input SQL text into a "prepared statement". Then it "executes" the prepared statement to generate a result.
In this essay, Carson Gross and Alex Petros discuss htmx's future direction and philosophy. They explain how the project aims to emulate jQuery's success through API stability, minimal feature additions, and quarterly releases while continuing to promote hypermedia-driven development and support the broader web…
A student who I used to tutor in CS occasionally sent me a meme yesterday which showed “NEW GRAD vs SENIOR DEVELOPER”; the new grad is all caps yelling NO! YOU CAN’T JUST USE BRUT…
I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my …
How we overvalue the wrong technology and novel aspects of interface design at the expense of substantial gains to our productivity.
Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on the Internet has a good idea of how prevalent meme usage has become in online discourse. Finding new memes on the latest happening and sharing them with various friend groups to share in the humor is a long-enjoyed pastime of mine. Working in tech and in the InfoSec field has…
Git repositories seem like an elegant solution for package registry data. Pull requests for governance, version history for free, distributed by design. But as registries grow, the cracks appear.
Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.
Everybody hates working on legacy projects, me as well. Working on one, however, helped me get a deeper understanding of the dev process.
During my final term at UWaterloo I took the CS444 compilers class with a project to write a compiler from a substantial subset of Java to x86, in teams of up to three people with a language of the group’s choice. This was a rare opportunity to compare implementations of large programs that all did the same thing…
Writing a sqlite clone from scratch in C
Stacked pull requests break large changes into small, reviewable pull requests. They’re an ordered series of pull requests that each represent focused layers of your change. With stacks, you can…
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Recently I wanted to deepen my understanding of bash by researching as much of it as possible. Because I felt bash is an often-used (and under-understood) technology, I ended up writing a book on it .
If you're running Firefox on macOS you might have noticed that its responsiveness has improved significantly in version 103.
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…
