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Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
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A simplified model of Fil-C
I've seen lots of chatter about Fil-C recently, which pitches itself as a memory safe implementation of C/C++. You can read the gritty details of how this is achieved, but for people coming across it for the first time, I think there is value in showing a simplified version, as once you've understood the simplified…
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How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
Julia, the programming language that originated as a research project at MIT, has gained a loyal following among scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others. The free and open-source language counts more than 1 million users, including people at thousands of companies and universities around the world.
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Flutter 3.47
Modular by design: Standalone UI Packages and Impeller on Desktop
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Precursor
Precursor, our new continuous behavioral validation engine for bot management, offers visibility into how humans and bots actually interact across the full user journey. By turning session-level behavior into bot detection signals, it identifies advanced automation with higher precision — while reducing friction for…
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Wirth's Revenge
Are LLMs the final blow in the war against Wirth's law?
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Full-Text Search with DuckDB
Pete Doherty is a NYC based software developer
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Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native
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Growing Trees
Growing procedural trees through competition for light: buds, resource allocation, shoot direction, and branch shedding.
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TorchTPU: Running PyTorch Natively on TPUs at Google Scale
Discover TorchTPU, Google’s new engineering stack designed to run PyTorch natively on TPU infrastructure with peak efficiency. Learn how its "Eager First" philosophy and XLA integration simplify model migration while unlocking massive scalability for the next generation of AI.
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Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)
People say “Comments should explain why, not what.” I feel like starting a flame war today so I’m going to argue that comments should explain ‘what’ too. Please don’t use this as justification to write bad code, okay? Okay. First of all, why shouldn’t comments explain ‘what’? If you need comments to explain what’s…
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Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers
Modern Object Pascal Introduction: units, classes, generics, memory management, exceptions and more.
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Lean now ships with verified kernels
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
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How to make Firefox builds 17% faster
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
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Bringing Clojure programming to Enterprise (2021)
How a dialect of LISP can help developping modern enterprise applications
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A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
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5NF and Database Design
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…
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Phoenix LiveView 1.2
LiveView 1.2 is a small release that adds support for colocating CSS.
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Girls just wanna have fast MPMC queues with bounded waiting
Disclaimer: An earlier version of this post claimed the structure is wait-free, this is incorrect. Being wait-free requires that failure or suspension of any thread can’t cause failure or suspension of another thread. This queue in fact does not fulfill that requirement. The main section which discusses the wait…
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Good CTE, Bad CTE
The planner treats CTEs very differently depending on how you write them. Here's what happens under the hood, version by version, through PostgreSQL 18.
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The Future of AI Software Development
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
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NixOS is making me less afraid
Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it . That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.
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Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
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What I learned by putting GitHub Copilot behind a MitM proxy
A look inside Copilot’s network traffic, harness, memory, and how context is becoming the product.
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--dangerously-skip-reading-code
What if we dutifully communicate the risks and trade-offs to our organizational leadership and they still want to take those risks