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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,833 posts.
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I uncovered an ACPI bug in my Dell Inspiron 5567. It was plaguing me for 8 years
Imagine you close your laptop lid to put it to sleep, but instead of pausing, it reboots. Not every time, just often enough to be infuriating. You try to save your work, but the machine decides to start over.
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Implementing Natural Conversational Agents with Elixir
In my last post , I discussed some work I had done building Nero, the assistant of the future that I’ve always wanted. I ended up creating an end-to-end example which used Nx, OpenAI APIs, and ElevenLabs to create an in-browser home automation assistant. For a first product, it’s decent. Nero is a neat little party…
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Making PostgreSQL tick: New features in pg_cron
Since pg_cron 1.5, you can easily schedule jobs that run every 1-59 seconds. And pg_cron 1.6 added support for Postgres 16. This blog post walks you through the benefits of second granularity jobs with the pg_cron open source extension to Postgres.
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Event Modeling
Event Modeling is a way to design a blueprint for an Information System of any size or scale. It is done in a way that allows the clearest communication of the system's workings to the largest possible cross-section of roles in an organization. The system can be checked for completeness by following the single thread…
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Contributing os.scandir() to Python
My experience contributing a medium-sized feature (os.scandir) to the Python 3.5 standard library.
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AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem
LLM models are plateauing, but true AGI isn't about scaling the next breakthrough model—it's about engineering the right context, memory, and workflow systems. AGI is fundamentally a systems engineering problem, not a model training problem.
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Ten years of “Go: The good, the bad, and the meh”
I wrote a blog post ten years ago. How do I feel about it now?
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Developer on Call
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
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Best practices for writing code comments
While there are many resources to help programmers write better code—such as books and static analyzers—there are few for writing better comments. While it's easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it's hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than…
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How to design software architecture for startups
A good software architecture for a startup looks very different from the one you might build for an enterprise system. Here is what worked for us.
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Memory safety is necessary, not sufficient
TL;DR: I think that a focus on memory safe languages (MSLs) versus non memory-safe languages is a bit of a red herring. The actual distinction is slightly…
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Ruby Blocks
How to start really getting Ruby, especially blocks.
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Comfy Software: A software aesthetic for hackers with depression
A software aesthetic for hackers with depression.
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How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack
Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which…
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Hidden Changes in GPT-4, Uncovered
The tool instructions in this article are not up to date as of 2024-01-12, see this post to learn more about the new tool OpenAI added to block conversations about U.S. elections using function calls.
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Revenge of the Types
Some notes about what appears to be current trend of programming languages and my thoughts about it.
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The responsibility we have as software engineers
I had the chance to chat this week with the very awesome Kate Heddleston who mentioned that she’s been thinking a lot about the ethics of being a software engineer, something she just spoke a…
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Exploring the new .NET “dotnet” CLI
I've never much liked the whole 'dnvm' and 'dnu' and 'dnx' command line stuff ...
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Concurrency in Haskell: Fast, Simple, Correct
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Leveraging Zig's Allocators
How Zig's allocators can help manage memory and improve performance
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I built a GPU back end for Emacs
A few months ago I became obsessed with a silly question: why does my Emacs, on a laptop with a perfectly capable GPU, draw all of its text using the…