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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
On the 31st August I got an email from a customer, telling me that they had found an imitation of my data wrangling software on Github. I’m not linking to it, but here is a screenshot: It is …
Calibrate your enthusiasm
Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the…
Back in 2019, SwiftUI was announced as the future of Apple development. Seven years later, it still feels like a beta version struggling with stability, performance, and many other aspects. What’s actually wrong with SwiftUI?
I had a friend tell me recently that all programming languages seem very similar to each other. They all have variables, and arrays, a few loop constructs, functions, and some arithmetic constructs. Sure, some languages have fancier features like first-class functions or coroutines, but he doesn't consider himself an…
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
From the Zed Blog: Run multiple agents at once, in the same window.
We’re happy to announce a new release of ClojureScript. If you’re an existing user of ClojureScript please read over the following release notes carefully.
We find that roughly half of test-passing SWE-bench Verified PRs written by recent AI agents would not be merged into main by repo maintainers. A naive interpretation of benchmark scores may lead one to overestimate how useful agents are without more elicitation or human feedback.
Making English more enjoyable to write.
I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them: Here’s one for the…
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
Lessons about XML from the open source IRS Tax Withholding Estimator.
Why should anyone care about low-level programming?
Node.js now has a virtual filesystem. Learn why VFS matters for testing, sandboxing, Single Executable Apps, and running generated code directly in me
Somewhere between 'ask Claude for a quick opinion' and 'Claude is writing our Jira tickets,' we lost the plot. AI agents are brilliant implementers. They're also confidently wrong about every decision that matters. And when it all falls over, they won't be the ones carrying the bag.
Real-SWE benchmarks frontier AI models on private production codebases licensed from real companies. Eighteen models across twenty-five tasks.
Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.
I don’t think I’ve ever quite articulated my “grand vision” for Rust, despite having written a fair bit about the language and its features. There is a lot I could say here, but currently there are three directions of development which I find particularly interesting:
As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. This feature allows the compiler to detect which individual functions and declarations have changed since a project was last built, recompile only that…
When those of us in the Vulkan® working group want to modify the API—whether it’s a new hardware feature to expose, a new use case we want to address, or even just a gap in the spec we want to address—we have one invaluable tool that we make heavy use of: extensions! Extensions are a wonderful way for us to get…
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my…
In part 1 of this series , we found that users generally view the most popular collaborative text editing algorithms (including the most popular library, Yjs ) as silently corrupting their documents when the algorithms resolve direct editing conflicts. We argued that, while this is potentially ok for live…
Today, we’re launching SWE-1.7, the most capable model we’ve trained so far. It reaches frontier-level intelligence at a much lower cost, advancing the…
Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has finally come to Python. I spent some time exploring it, and here is how it works.
You can just prove things, apparently.
