601
The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh…
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
602
Swift Package Index joins Apple
Swift Package Index is now part of Apple. Here's what that means.
603
The reverts will continue until morale improves
Many readers will be aware that an unusually high number of features have been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after the beta period began. Having some reverts is not unusual, maybe one per cycle could be expected. But this time around, about 8 to 10 significant features, depending on how you count, have been…
604
Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that…
605
One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash
Reporting on 2B tokens of AI usage and what shapes model selection and cost
606
Make Tmux the OS
I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+
607
Rhombus Language 1.0
Rhombus version 1.0 is now available! Install: https://rhombus-lang.org/download.html More information: https://rhombus-lang.org/ Why a new language? https://rhombus-lang.org/goal.html (copied below) Frequently Asked Questions: https...
608
We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare
Cloudflare is hosting a competition to see who will build the next Git platform for an era of AI agents. Artifacts is in open beta, with Workers bindings, data jurisdiction controls, and event subscriptions for repository changes.
609
We have proof automation now
I've long had a soft spot for dependently-typed languages like Coq Rocq and Lean. They offer the possibility of a type system capable of encoding and enforcing arbitrarily subtle invariants. The sort of thing that, in regular languages, ends up (at best) as a comment, and which quickly gets lost as the size of the…
610
Faster than earcut: triangulating 3.7M map polygons in 489 ms
We published the triangulator of our map engine as earstrip, an ISC-licensed C++ and WebAssembly library. How it came to be: the ear clipper rebuilt one idea at a time and timed on 3.7 million polygons of real map data.
611
XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
Somehow xor became the most popular version.
612
Everything old is new again: memory optimization
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full bl...
613
Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
I always felt a little bad for the ghosts in Pac-Man. They patrol the maze, they corner the guy, and then he eats a glowing pellet and suddenly they're the ones running for their lives. So I built a small game where you finally get to play the other side.
614
VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
615
SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
616
I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music
I always liked to see and touch the cover artwork of the CDs and LPs I bought in the past, but in the end the convenience of digital streaming won me over and I accepted no (or stamp-sized) artwork. Lately I’ve been missing this more and more and ultimately decided to try to do something about it. So I built a…
617
Hand Drawn QR Codes (2025)
I really like QR codes. Recently I purchased a new sticky-note-like pad from a new local stationery store in Minneapolis. The sheets have a 10x10 grid and 2x10 grid. I knew what I wanted to...
618
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
619
Use boring languages with LLMs
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
620
Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
A programmer's text editor is their castle
621
You only need the frontier model for one single edit
/prewalk hands the cheap model a trajectory, not a plan, retaining 92–97% of frontier pass rate at roughly half the cost on SWE-Bench Pro.
622
Training AI to Paint with Code
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
623
The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
624
625
A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
626
Redis 8.8: New array data structure, rate limiter, performance improvements
Redis 8.8 is now available in Open Source. Explore the new array data type, window counter rate limiter, streams NACK, and more performance-focused updates.
627
Java is fast, code might not be
Fixing common Java anti-patterns took an app from 1,198ms to 239ms. Eight patterns that compile fine and pass code review but silently drain CPU and balloon heap, with benchmarks and code fixes for each
628
629
630
Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea
LLM-based agents can do a lot of tasks. Or, at least, they can appear to do them. For example, they write code, summarize papers, plan trips, and fill in forms. If you ask one for a probability or a confidence score, it will give you one of those too. I have seen many agent designers use LLMs to generate confidence…