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Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
422
A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
Guide to the DeltaNet Family of linear attention mechanisms.
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Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
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Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language
just a diary
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Measuring the sloppiness of code
Exploring how to measure code sloppiness, why correct code can still erode a codebase, and why human intuition and taste still matter.
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MCP is dead; long live MCP
Understanding the social media zeitgeist around CLIs and the premature death of MCP
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We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster
We rewrote our Rust WASM Parser in TypeScript - and it got 3x Faster
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Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If
Why a filter is slowest when it keeps half of random input, and what a branchless rewrite gains there and loses at 1%.
429
We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
Literate programming is the idea that code should be intermingled with prose such that an uninformed reader could read a code base as a narrative, and come away with an understanding of how it works and what it does. Although I have long been intrigued by this idea, and have found uses for it in a couple1 of different…
430
Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Jamf Threat Labs uncovers North Korean hackers exploiting VS Code to deploy backdoor malware via malicious Git repositories in the Contagious Interview campaign
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Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5
A substantial improvement in intelligence and behavior over Composer 2, particularly on long-horizon agentic tasks.
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Scaling long-running autonomous coding
We've been experimenting with running coding agents autonomously for weeks at a time.
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Squeak 6.1
These release notes are optimized for viewing inside Squeak, as they contain a lot of interactive examples. On this page, interactive links open in SqueakJS, which is a browser-based Smalltalk VM with some limitations. For the best experience, download Squeak and read the release notes there.
434
Perfection is not over-engineering
The industry conflates perfection with over-engineering. They're not the same. Over-engineering is solving the wrong problem; a perfect solution exists once the requirements are clear.
435
What are skiplists good for?
An exotic data structure and a whole lot of JOINs.
436
Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
My personal website, portfolio, and blog.
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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …
439
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
440
I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
441
The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
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I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
I built KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound LLMs and coding agents, and benchmarked the major models against it.
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How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.
445
DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots
(This post is part of a series on the subject of my hobby project, which is recreating the C source code for the 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II by reverse engineering the original binaries.)
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Prolog Basics Explained with Pokémon
Demonstrating the basics of logic programming with data from the Pokémon games.
447
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that…
448
Solving Factorio Quality
I play Factorio the normal way: by writing matrix math code to plan the factory.
449
How close can pure functional programming get to C?
In Why Lean is Faster Than Rust , the author shares an impressive result: a DEFLATE compression library written in Lean 4 , a functional programming language and proof assistant, outperforming an equivalent Rust package that crates.io says has been downloaded over a billion times. From the article:
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How I'm Productive with Claude Code
It’s been about 6 weeks since I joined Tano, and this is what my commit history looks like: