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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.
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The Developer Coefficient: a $300B opportunity for businesses
Stripe is a financial services platform that helps all types of businesses accept payments, build flexible billing models, and manage money movement.
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Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Solid core + capability-based sandboxes + LLMs = Users with superpowers
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A Tmux Crash Course (2011)
Learn everything you need to be productive in tmux.
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OCaml 4.03: Everything else
In my previous post I wrote about Flambda, which is the single biggest feature coming to OCaml in this release. In this post, I’ll review the other features ...
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2FA on the command line
OTP: One-Time Password TOTP: Time-based One-time Password algorithm 2FA: Two-factor authentication There is no shortage of OTP 2FA apps availiable for your phone, such as Google Authenticator or Duo Mobile. These apps take an initial secret code, and create a TOTP anytime you need a 2FA code for login.… …
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Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
We decided it was time to reinvest in the PDF viewer (PDF.js) and support filling PDF forms within Firefox to make our users' lives easier.
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The future of Python build systems and Gentoo
Anyone following my Twitter could have seen me complaining about things happening around Python build systems frequently. The late changes feel like people around the Python packaging ecosystem hav…
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PEP 0484 – Type Hints is accepted
PEP 3107 introduced syntax for function annotations, but the semantics were deliberately left undefined. There has now been enough 3rd party usage for static type analysis that the community would benefit from a standard vocabulary and baseline tools w...
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Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink
The dream of hypermedia can come to fruition in a world where clients can not only parse, but navigate with intent.
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Is sorted using SIMD instructions
Recently, I came across a function that checks whether an array is sorted, i.e. if there is no element which would be greater than its successor. Below is a sample implementation:
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The RubyGems "Security Incident"
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
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Magic Numbers
1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?
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Citations on the Anthropic API
Claude can now cite specific passages from your documents, delivering verifiable responses with built-in source tracking. Update: Now available in Amazon Bedrock. (June 30, 2025) Today, we're launching Citations, a new API feature that lets Claude ground its answers in source documents.
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The long arrow operator in C++
Dr Ivan Čukić -- author of the 'Functional Programming in C++' book, KDE developer and Free/Libre Software enthusiast.
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Will It Optimize? (2010)
See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…
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Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript
Today, Mozilla Research publicly announced the Shumway project . Shumway is JS/HTML library which displays SWF (Flash) content entirely using open web technologies.
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The Emacs Calculator (2009)
Did you know that Emacs comes with a calculator ? Woop-dee-doo! Call the presses! Wow, a whole calculator! Sounds a bit lame, right?
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Both true and false: a Zen moment with C
I ran into a really fun bug at work yesterday, where I discovered that my C program was branching down logically inconsistent code paths. After drinking another cup of coffee and firing up GDB I realized that somehow, a boolean variable in my code was simultaneously testing as both true and not true.
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You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing