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Add an AI Code Copilot to your product using GPT-4
The AI Code Copilot has been replaced by the more powerful AI Chat feature.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.
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Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited
Back in 2017 I wrote an article in which I attempted to explain how YouTube works under the hood, how it serves streams to the client, and also how you can exploit that knowledge to download videos from the site. The primary goal of that write-up was to…
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Implementing Wordle in the Firefox address bar
A version of Wordle that runs inside the Firefox address bar via abuse of the Opensearch spec.
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Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't (2019)
For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…
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I Built Linux from Scratch
Linux From Scratch or LFS is a project that provides and maintains a set of instructions of how to build your own Linux system from scratch. I am always curious to understand how things work ‘under the hood’, and since I’m a daily Linux user i decided to take on the challenge to try and complete building Linux From…
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The Stupid Programmer Manifesto
I'm not smart enough for modern web development, and that's ok
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Bun v0.7.0
vite dev support, Workers, bun --smol, WebSocket.ping(), structuredClone(), serialize() and better Node.js compatibility
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Lessons from Creating a VSCode Extension with GPT-4
Lately, I've been playing around with LLMs to write code.
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CRDT-richtext: Rust implementation of Peritext and Fugue
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Understanding every byte in a WASM module
In my last post, we explored how to build WASM modules, both with and without WASI support, using Clang. In a comment on Reddit, it was mentioned that much of the setup I walked through in that post could be avoided by just leveraging Zig’s WASI supprt. This is a great point, and I would recommend doing the same. The…
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New C features in GCC 13
The GNU Compiler Collection 13 release implemented a number of interesting features in its C front-end. This article summarizes the most interesting ones.
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How to speed up the Rust compiler
It has been five months since my last general update on the Rust compiler’s performance. Let’s see what has happened in that time.
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Fuyu-8B: A multimodal architecture for AI agents
We’re open-sourcing Fuyu-8B - a small version of the multimodal model that powers our product.
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Matrices and Graph
The single most undervalued fact of linear algebra: matrices are graphs, and graphs are matrices
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Fantastic Learning Resources
People sometimes ask me: Alex, how do I learn X?. This article is a compilation of advice I usually give. This is things that worked for me rather than the most awesome things on earth. I do consider every item on the list to be fantastic though, and I am forever grateful to people putting these resources together.
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Setenv Is Not Thread Safe and C Doesn't Want to Fix It
You can't safely use the C setenv() or unsetenv() functions in a program that uses threads. Those functions modify global state, and can cause other threads calling getenv() to crash. This also causes crashes in other languages that use those C standard library functions, such as Go's os.Setenv ( Go issue ) and Rust's…
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Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language
Sometimes we have ideas that are bad but demand to enter reality. A few months ago, while chatting with a friend, we toyed around with the idea of a language where the only control flow you get is error handling. This idea embedded itself in my brain and wouldn't let me go, so I kept just talking about it until two…
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My Problem with the Four-Document Model
Two universal facts about user documentation: Documentation is really important. We are really bad at writing it. We don’t have good theories on what makes for useful documentation. That is except for the four document model, or Diátaxis.1 I’m glad that people use it. I’m also a little frustrated that people use it…
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The beauty of finished software
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word…
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Two types of software engineers
One assumes it's easy because it's a non-technical problem, the other assumes that's why it's hard
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Turbo Rascal Syntax Error
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
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Python, C, Assembly – Faster Cosine Similarity
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.