661
Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie
How I used a compressed trie data structure to encode Icelandic declension data.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
662
Gleam v1.9
News post: Gleam v1.9.0 released
663
TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024)
An exploration of the layout models of TeX and Typst.
664
Creating the Longest Possible Ski Jump in “The Games: Winter Challenge”
An investigation into The Games; Winter Challenge
665
RIP pthread_cancel
I posted about adding pthread_cancel use in curl about three weeks ago, we released this in curl 8.16.0 and it blew up right in our faces. Now, with #18540 we are ripping it out again. What happened? short recap pthreads define “Cancelation points”, a list of POSIX functions where a pthread may be cancelled. In…
666
How IMAP works under the hood
Learning how the IMAP protocol actually works
667
The unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzing for porting programs
A simple strategy of having LLMs write fuzz tests and build up a port in topological order seems effective at automating porting from C to Rust.
668
Zig's Lovely Syntax
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
669
I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance
I needed to choose a framework for a mobile-first app at work. I started comparing Next.js, SolidStart, and SvelteKit, then expanded to 10 frameworks. The measurements revealed dramatic differences in bundle sizes, performance, and the real cost of framework choices.
670
API design note: Beware of adding an "Other" enum value
What are you going to do when you add a new kind?
671
Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C
UPDATED: 2025-02-15: Fixed some bugs in the examples and pointed out that you don't usually just want to panic on memory allocation failure.
672
My first impressions of Gleam
What I’ve learned in my first few hours using Gleam for a small project.
673
Go is a good fit for agents
Golang might just be the best language for building AI agents.
674
My first attempt at iOS app development
A week ago, I knew absolutely nothing about Swift. Today, I have a working iOS app sitting on my Mac and my test device
675
Jujutsu VCS: Introduction and patterns
Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, when I finally…
676
Go Proposal: Secret Mode
Automatically erase memory to prevent secret leaks.
677
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Rating 26 years of Java changes
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
679
Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
Matyáš Racek's blog
680
CamoLeak: Critical GitHub Copilot Vulnerability Leaks Private Source Code
Get details on our discovery of a critical vulnerability in GitHub Copilot Chat.
681
Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them
Programming languages have rapidly evolved in recent years. But in software development, the new often meets the old, and the scaffolding that OS gives for running new processes hasn’t changed much since Unix.
682
The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake
My presentation from the inaugural Better Software Conference, with notes.
683
Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers
File parsers in Go contain unexpected behaviors that can lead to serious security vulnerabilities. This post examines how JSON, XML, and YAML parsers in Go handle edge cases in ways that have repeatedly resulted in high-impact security issues in production systems. We explore three real-world attack scenarios…
684
Malware found on NPM infecting local package with reverse shell
For the first time, RL researchers discover malicious locally-installed npm packages infecting other legitimate packages.
685
Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
686
Write the damn code
You are a software engineer. Don't become a prompt refiner.
687
At the end you use `git bisect`
People rant about having to learn algorithmic questions for interviews. I get it — interview system is broken, but you ought to learn binary search at least.
688
The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL
How RL training will scale up to thousands of diverse environments, similar to how pretraining scaled up text corpora.
689
A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, calle...
690
How Compiler Explorer Works in 2025
How we handle 92 million compilations a year without everything catching fire