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How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
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I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it
The personal website of Elias Daler about programming, technology and videogames
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Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
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A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time
Pingora handles 35M+ requests per second, so saving a few microseconds per request can translate to thousands of dollars saved on computing costs. In this post, we share how we freed up over 500 CPU cores by optimizing one function and announce trie-hard, the open source crate that we created to do it.
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Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
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Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use.
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All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. To name a few: an “everything app” called 75grand with dining hall menus, Moodle assignments, building hours, an event calendar, and more; two unfinished course catalogs; and a university shuttle tracker. None…
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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
In this article, we explore Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. We explore its syntax, current uses and possible uses; we test its scripting system, which is incredibly powerful; we compare it with LaTeX, Markdown and Word, which can be used in similar roles; and we explore its applicability to the task…
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In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers 1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed…
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Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
Practical accounting for fintech engineers, and also how not to repeat my silly mistakes.
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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
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A Git story: Not so fun this time
Linus Torvalds once wrote in a book that he created Linux just for fun , but it ended up sparking a revolution. Git, his second major creation, was also an accidental revolution. It’s now a standard tool for software engineers, but its origin story wasn’t so much fun this time, at least for Linus.
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We made an animated movie in 8kB
The Sheep and the Flower - a demoscene production and real-time animation that looks like a standard short animated movie, in just 8kB
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jQuery v4.0 Beta
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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The Origins of DS_store (2006)
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
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Writing Gnome Apps with Swift
Swift is well-suited for creating user interfaces thanks to the clean syntax, static typing, and special features making code easier to write. Result builders, combined with Swift’s closure expression syntax, can significantly enhance code readability.
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What's New in Ruby on Rails 8
What Rails 8 ships and requires: built-in authentication, Solid Queue, Kamal 2, and production SQLite, plus support timelines and an upgrade checklist.
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A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago
I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me. If you (or your team) are shooting…
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I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code
(Not an anti-AI post — Copilot is great, I use it all the time.)
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Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
Yesterday Andres Freund emailed oss-security@ informing the community of the discovery of a backdoor in xz/liblzma, which affected OpenSSH server (huge respect for noticing and investigating this). Andres' email is an amazing summary of the whole drama, so I'll skip that. While admittedly most juicy and interesting…
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Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with
An overview of the ongoing efforts to improve and roll out support for free-threaded CPython throughout the Python open source ecosystem
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Devin: AI Software Engineer
News, research, and engineering deep dives from Cognition, the team behind Devin, the autonomous software engineer.
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I’m writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
sqlite-vec is an new vector search SQLite extension, coming soon!
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Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason
tl;dr: high_impact is small game engine for 2D action games. It's written in C, compiles to Windows, Mac and Linux as well as to WASM for the Web. It's “inspired by” my original Impact JavaScript game engine from 2010. The name high_impact is a nod to a time when C was considered a high level language.
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I just wanted Emacs to look nice – Using 24-bit color in terminals
Thanks to some coworkers and David Wilson’s Emacs from Scratch playlist, I’ve been getting back into Emacs. The community is more vibrant than the last time I looked, and LSP brings modern completion and inline type checking.
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The C23 edition of Modern C
The C23 edition of Modern C is now available for free download from And as before a dedicated page for the book may be found at where you also may find a link to download the code examples that com…
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93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?