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Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts
thoughts, talks, docs and unpopular opinions
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
362
Python is not a great language for data science
It may be a good language for data science, but it’s not a great one.
363
Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
364
Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at
I’ve been trying to slowly ease into using LLMs for coding help again lately (after quitting ), but something always feels off -- like we’re not quite on the...
365
LLM-powered tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replacing them
How LLM-powered programming tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replace them
366
Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
367
Rails for everything
After spending part of my holiday building and deploying a new Rails 8 application, It's clearer than ever that Rails is awesome, and it's especially great f...
368
Litestar is worth a look
A few years ago at work, I had a project which offered an opportunity to look at the new generation …
369
What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
370
Zlib-rs is faster than C
We've released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs , featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too.
371
The hidden cost of AI coding
AI coding tools boost productivity but may sacrifice the flow state and deep satisfaction developers experience when writing code by hand. What are we losing?
372
MCP is eating the world
Despite the hype, Model Context Protocol (MCP) isn’t magic or revolutionary. But, it’s simple, well-timed, and well-executed. At Stainless, we’re betting it’s here to stay.
373
Jules, our asynchronous coding agent
Jules is officially out of beta and launching publicly, powered by Gemini 2.5.During the beta, thousands of developers tackled tens of thousands of tasks, resulting in o…
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The role of developer skills in agentic coding
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
376
Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
377
I'll think twice before using GitHub Actions again
The blog post discusses dissatisfaction with GitHub Actions due to its limitations in managing complex workflows, especially in monorepo setups with certain features like pull request checks and workflow reusability. Several issues have been highlighted, along with alternatives for GitHub Actions.
378
How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare
I’ve been using Obsidian for all my writing lately, and it’s been a game changer. The local-first model means everything lives as plain text on my machine, and with the Minimal theme, the interface stays clean and distraction-free. My vault lives in iCloud (Dropbox or Google Drive work too), so notes sync seamlessly…
379
Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% Rust
Today we published bzip2 version 0.6.0 , which uses our rust implementation of the bzip2 algorithm, libbz2-rs-sys , by default. The bzip2 crate is now faster and easier to cross-compile.
380
Racket v9.0
_posted by Stephen De Gabrielle and John Clements_ We are pleased to announce Racket v9.0 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/. **Racket 9.0 is here!** A major release is always exciting and Racket 9.0 is no exception in that it intr...
381
Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
This post celebrates influential papers that shaped technology and communication. Their foundational concepts inspire continued innovation, highlighting the importance of understanding our roots fo…
382
Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature
I recently shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature (unobtrusive macOS automatic updates) that was largely developed with AI.
383
Rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool
For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from…
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Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust
I have a hobby. Whenever I see the comment // this should never happen in code, I try to find out the exact conditions under which it could happen. And in 90% of cases, I find a way to do just that. More often than not, the developer just hasn’t cons…
385
A Vulnerability in Libsodium
Libsodium is now 13 years old!
386
Forth: The programming language that writes itself
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
387
Pwning the Ladybird Browser
Ladybird is a relatively new browser engine originating from the SerenityOS project . Currently, it’s in pre-alpha and improving quickly. Take a look at the website and the GitHub for more information!
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Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you.
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Helix Editor 25.07
A post-modern modal text editor.
390
I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C
For the last 6 months, I’ve been spending my (limited) free time on evenings and weekends writing a WebAssembly VM in C. After repeatedly throwing away small side-projects, this was an extremely productive experience for me as an engineer. I’m writing this in order to put together some take-aways and organize my…