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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,827 posts.
The rise of AI-powered coding has created an unexpected market: cleaning up the technical debt from prompt-generated software. Here's why 'Vibe Coding cleanup' is becoming a legitimate service category and what it means for the future of software development.
‘all.equal(f, g)’ for ‘function’s now by default also compares their ‘environment(.)’s, notably via new ‘all.equal’ method for class ‘function’. Comparison of ‘nls()’ fits, e.g., may now need ‘all.equal(m1, m2, check.environments=FALSE)’.
This addendum to the GPT-5 system card shares a new model: GPT-5-Codex, a version of GPT-5 further optimized for agentic coding in Codex. GPT-5-Codex adjusts its thinking effort more dynamically based on task complexity, responding quickly to simple conversational queries or small tasks, while independently working…
Inspired by numerous other such lists of falsehoods. Pretty much every video player in existence gets a good chunk if not the vast majority of these wrong. (Some of these also/mostly apply to users, though)
Why "SHA 256-bits enterprise-grade password encryption" is only slightly better than storing passwords in plain text, and better ways to do it.
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…
Building, packaging & deploying Python using versioned artifacts in Debian packages.
One person's entry-level contribution is another person's difficult bugfix or backport.
A comprehensive Vim tutorial that teaches Vim as a language rather than memorizing commands. Learn movements, text objects, visual mode, and advanced techniques.
Examining why some popular iOS apps suddenly got bigger after releasing with Xcode 14.
When considering the panel to discuss concurrency, you’d be pushed to find a higher calibre than Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong, and Carl Hewitt.
I came upon a very interesting and cryptic snippet of code somewhere nameless , and I can’t decide if it is brilliant or completely insane. It is a very obscure way of accomplishing the required task, but it’s around four times faster than the alternatives I’ve tried, so I have to admit that it’s not completely…
A complete list of SQLite releases in a single page and a chronology are both also available. A detailed history of every check-in is available at SQLite version control site .
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
Hi, I'm Kenneth. I’m a Swiss transplant in San Francisco. I’m an angel investor, and an engineer at AngelList & CSC. Previously, I was co-founder of FreshPay and the architect behind Chartboost. When I'm not working, you can find me either photographing some remote corner of the world, or hacking away on an…
As a 13 year old, my dad’s advice on internet presence was: “Everything you post will be used against you in the future. So you should never associate your name with anything on the internet”. As a rebellious teenager my view was the opposite: “Everything you post on the internet will get lost. You should associate…
Applying the type-driven mindset to rust via the "Parse, don't Validate" pattern
Hello there! This is my personal website and it is allergic to SEO.
A fresh new alternative to the official Nix installation scripts.
Personal website of Doğaç Eldenk.
I spent years building one of the most popular LED strip visualizers on GitHub. It's the kind of project that's easy to get started but diabolically hard to master.
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date. Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a progress report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers…
Parallax scrolling – creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene by having the background and foreground move at different speeds – is pretty much a staple of platformers and other 2D g…
Hi! It feels like I did one of these posts just the other day, but it was a month ago? Time sure does fly… Since there’s a round number in the title of this blog post, perhaps I should …
I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…
Today, we’re going to look at the many ways of implementing user-to-kernel transitions on x86, i.e. system calls. Let’s first quickly review what system calls actually need to accomplish.
