961
I changed my license
In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,414 posts.
962
How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing
A false dichotomy that hides the real request
963
So, you want to chunk really fast?
How we built memchunk - a blazing fast text chunking library using SIMD and memchr for RAG pipelines
964
Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools
Test-case reducers are less well known than they should be, and those who are aware of them don’t always realise the variety of ways we can use – perhaps even abuse! – them. In this post, I’m going to explore some of the things I’ve learnt while using these wonderful tools. I’ll start at the basics, because the idea…
965
IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.
966
Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick
The following post involves far too much discussion of the XOR swap trick. If XOR itself is unfamiliar, I have written a gentler introduction to it .
967
The case of the 9 bit AES key
Several PDF implementations advertise AES-256, but generate the 256-bit key from either a very small state space, or from insecure random sources.
968
Fancy Curl Sites
So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands!
969
Needed 1+1, built a functional programming language
A deep dive into converting a simple arithmetic expression into a binary tree, leading to a custom language in C.
970
971
Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.
972
LLMs are not superhuman at reading and writing neural network weights
A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra…
973
Vibecoding #2
I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don't expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it's only proper if I write one.
974
We're training a Figma-fluent editing model
Here, we’re sharing the research behind how we’re translating that to design editing workflows.
975
DLL that was not present in memory despite not being formally unloaded
Figuring out how it went missing.
976
We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
Vary support is now available in Cache Rules on every plan. You can normalize known negotiation headers, pass exact values through to the origin when those small differences matter, or bypass cache when the variation is too unpredictable.
977
Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
978
Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
Micropayment-powered stories
979
I hate you Microsoft
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
980
Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism. I read a lot of this textbook, got my fill, and probably won’t read more of it in the near future so wanted to write this…
981
VHDL's Crown Jewel
How VHDL preserves determinism In this post, I would like to talk about VHDL’s crown jewel: how it preserves determinism in a concurrent language. Here is a figure of how it works:
982
Benchmark in Milliseconds
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
983
What years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents
Python and JavaScript/TypeScript AI frameworks are reinventing what telecom solved in 1986. What 40 years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents.
984
Differences Between `Foldl` and `Foldr`
`foldl` and `foldr` can be confusing, so let's work out what's up
985
PageRank explained
Picture this, the year is 1996. You find yourself frustrated with the incumbent search engines like AltaVista, which primarily does a content-based search (it'll give you an article on "Hotels for Chickens" if you search "Hotels" because the word matches). There's gotta be a better way, right? Well, in hindsight, of…
986
Dealing with abandonware (2024)
reverse engineering, abandonware
987
Ten lines of code that changed my world
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
988
You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles
Git packfiles were designed for mmap and local disk, so pulling one object out of a bucket means guessing at a byte range. I wrote a new format instead.
989
Patching my guitar amp's firmware
I’m having a lot of fun with reverse engineering lately, so when I was looking over the service manual for my guitar amp, a Yamaha THR10c, and saw references to a UART header in the schematic, I got excited. I wondered if anything cool was hiding in there. Next to it was a JTAG header. I knew next to nothing about…
990
Working with Git Worktrees in Magit
I’ll admit that until fairly recently I had no idea git worktrees existed. They’ve been part of git for a decade1 and I never once needed them. Feature branches did the job just fine - create a branch, do the work, merge it, delete it, and start over. What finally introduced me to worktrees was, of all things, AI…