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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,810 posts.
Origin begins rolling out today in early beta on all paid plans. We're starting with the essentials, designed for agent scale: repos, pull requests, code browsing, and GitHub sync. Agent-native features ship soon.
What's inside that package.json? Pain.
To help fellow engineers wrap their head around Apache Kafka and event streaming, I wrote a 4-part series on the Confluent blog on Kafka’s core fundamentals....
A new edition of the book Modern C and much more are now available under a CC license via the following page This edition is the result of a collaboration with Manning, and improves a lot over the…
Your website is slow, but the backend is fast. How do you diagnose performance issues on the frontend of your site? We'll discuss everything involved in constructing a webpage and how to profile it...
This post introduces paging, a very common memory management scheme that we will also use for our operating system. It explains why memory isolation i…
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use.
LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI ships a .pth credential stealer and a sitecustomize.py backdoor that run on every Python start. How the implant got in, what it steals, and indicators of compromise.
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…
Last month I have been on a multi-day hike with my dad. Each of us took many pictures, and when we came back we put them all in a shared folder. We both have Android phones, and the naming scheme used for our pictures was the same: IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss followed maybe by some other numbers and then a .jpg . Here YYYY…
Location-based language setting is a bad idea. It's much better to use the browser's language.
This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully.
You can use of UUIDs as the primary key to avoid database scale problems. But should you? I propose an alternative.
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…
The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he destroyed it. He…
Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?
Client-side navigation is supposed to make your pages load faster. But when I tried it, it was actually slower! Why?
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
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Have you ever been curious about how Software engineering within SpaceX works? I did some research and compiled my notes in this article. There are also some…
There is a simple, useful idiom to make your bash scripts more robust - ensuring they always perform necessary cleanup operations, even when something unexpected goes wrong. The secret sauce is a pseudo-signal provided by bash, called EXIT, that you can trap ; commands or functions trapped on it will execute when the…
As I’ve been blogging a lot more about Python over the last year, I thought I’d list a few of my favourite ‘new’ Python modules from 2015. These aren’t necessarily modules that were newly released in 2015, but modules that were ‘new to me’ this year – and may be new to you too!
Updated: this was solved on Hacker News. Details in Bug #915: solved!
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…
Practical accounting for fintech engineers, and also how not to repeat my silly mistakes.
Thesis: reliable agents tackling complex tasks need deterministic control flow encoded in software, not increasingly elaborate prompt chains If you’ve eve...
