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The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
782
Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking
You all know me, I love exploring new memory safety approaches and blending them together in weird ways.
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Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate
Optimisation of bloom filters in Floe using double bit setting with lightweight hashing.
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How to build a diffusion language model
An introduction to diffusion language models and the research advances that underlie today's diffusion LLMs. We describe the building blocks of recent open-source models, starting from simple masking diffusion, and including techniques for iterative refinement, post-training, and variable-length generation. Material…
786
Replacing Protobuf with Rust
Forking pg_query.rs to replace Protobuf with bindgen-generated direct C-to-Rust struct mappings, yielding 5x faster query parsing and 10x faster deparsing in PgDog.
787
The Benchmarkpocalypse
There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse.
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WASM is not quite a stack machine
Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a major difference between Wasm and all…
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Model Training as Code
Model training has grown complex enough to require many specialised stages and teams, and manual coordination between them doesn’t scale. At Aleph Alpha, we’ve built Savanna, a model factory that implements the entire training pipeline in code.
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The agent harness belongs outside the sandbox
Two architectures for running agent harnesses, the tradeoffs between them, and how we make skills and memories work when the harness isn't local.
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Scaling long-running autonomous coding
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …
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Crystal 1.22
We are announcing a new Crystal release 1.22.0 with several new features and bug fixes.
794
Compressing a flag to 11 bits
I recently saw an interesting YouTube video by “Physics for the Birds”. The main video is about matrixes, but he used flags to explain some of the operations on matrixes:
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10 REM"_(C2SLFF4
That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard's Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform.
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Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
Software engineer, Warsaw.
797
Go.sum is not a lockfile
In Go, go.mod acts as both manifest and lockfile. There is never a reason to look at go.sum.
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Monte-Carlo Simulations
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] .
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Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64
Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
801
OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof
When OpenAI released their proof that solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up in finite time, they also released a formal proof in Lean 4.
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Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
A tour of erm, a local CLI that removes disfluencies from English speech recordings using faster-whisper, a few detectors that look at the audio directly, and ffmpeg.
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We Built a Video Rendering Engine by Lying to the Browser About What Time It Is
How Replit turns any web page into a deterministic video by virtualizing time itself, patching key browser audio APIs, and waging war against headless Chrome's quirks.
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Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game
Recovering and preserving Crimsonland, the 2003 top-down shooter, through reverse engineering of its original binary.
806
Building a Shell
I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.
807
Looking at Unity made me understand the point of C++ coroutines
I had seen many talks about coroutines but it never really clicked where I could use them outisde of async IO. Until I looked at how Unity uses them in C#.
808
A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts
Right-clicking and shift-clicking.
809
Agentic coding notes
I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience . An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a thousand agents so they can do even more of that.
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The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
The transition to the Rust version of the React Compiler for the 1,036-file React Router codebase resulted in a significant speed increase, improving build times from 14.3 seconds to 0.81 seconds. The new compiler addresses previous limitations and ensures consistency across the toolchain, making it easier to manage…