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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse , indicating that whatever defaults developers are using may not work very well. Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use…
Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without…
python has 6 pre-declared "constants": True , False , None , __debug__ , Ellipsis (or equivalently ... ), and NotImplemented . but they all behave slightly differently, for some reason.
Every dataframe library ships with hundreds of operations. pandas alone has over 200 methods on a DataFrame. Is pivot different from melt? Is apply different from map? What about transform, agg, applymap, pipe? Some of these seem like the same operation wearing different hats. Others seem genuinely distinct. Without a…
History of the development of my windowed operating system for 32-bit Am29000 processors when I was age 18.
Update: I've since added multithreading and pushed astroz to 326M propagations/sec. Read the follow-up → I've spent the past month optimizing SGP4 propagat...
Righty-ho, I’m back from Rust Nation, and busily horrifying my teenage daughter with my (admittedly atrocious) attempts at doing an English accent 1 . It was a great trip with a lot of good conversations and some interesting observations. I am going to try to blog about some of them, starting with some thoughts…
Java 17 introduced sealed classes, which allow you to explicitly list the allowed sub-types of an interface or base class. For example, here’s a toy example using a sealed interface and records (in…
Ape coding is the software development practice where a human developer deliberately hand-writes source code.
A practical workflow for running 4–8 parallel coding agents using Claude Code, tmux, and a Markdown-based feature design system.
Stripe's Knowledge AI Platform is our versatile AI agent platform built to handle diverse non-coding knowledge work, from quick queries to complex, multi-day projects. By connecting employees to over 1,000 internal tools and skills, it enables secure, enterprise-scale productivity across the organization.
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self....
A post by Eshel Yaron introducing the Emacs Trust Manager
Please, feel free to gather better data yourself and prove me wrong. If you do so I'll link to it!
An opposite view on .gitignore files.
I wrote a specification for a new terminal escape sequence: OSC 7501, the Program Status Protocol . It lets any program tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting on the user, finished, or failed, and why.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Against dependency cooldowns as a response to supply chain attacks
Archiving 104K files into tar.gz reduced I/O time by 43x and total processing time by 2.3x. The bottleneck was not disk speed, it was syscall overhead.
What if I told you SQL could play chess? No JavaScript, no frameworks - just pure SQL rendering a full chess board in your browser.
net/http/httptrace has been in the standard library since Go 1.7 and most Go developers I talk to have never used it. It exposes hooks for the points in an outgoing HTTP request that you usually cannot see from outside the transport: DNS resolution, connection acquisition, TLS handshake, the moment bytes go on the…
Lotus Notes had encryption, rich text, and read receipts before email did. Why it still failed, and the dangers of starting software from scratch.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Fixes 23 issues (addressing 13 👍). Run multiple scripts in --parallel or --sequential. bun:test mock & spyOn get Symbol.dispose support. ESM bytecode compilation. Faster Bun.markdown. Faster RegExp, String.prototype.trim, String.prototype.startsWith.
When timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
It has been about four months since I returned to Zig after being absent for a few years. In this time, I have written some software in Zig and reengaged with the community, online and in person. I decided to share some of that experience, including what I have liked about Zig so far and what I haven't. I'll include…
How Go 1.26's source-level inliner works, and how it can help you with self-service API migrations.
Magic files and where to find them: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .mailmap, .git-blame-ignore-revs, .lfsconfig, and more.
The git flag I assumed was an LLM hallucination
