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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,415 posts.
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AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
AI tools lower the barrier to producing code, not to building reliable systems. The hard part — maintaining alignment between specifications, tests, and implementation — has not gone away. Expertise still matters.
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Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
In 1582, under the inter gravissimas papal bull, the Catholic world transitioned from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar . This new calendar shortened the length of the year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 , a reduction of just 0.002% .
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The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
A practical introduction to TLA+, why it matters for agentic coding, and how AI could take formal verification from models to machine-checked proofs and ultimately to verified software.
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Rhombus 1.1 is now available
Rhombus version 1.1 is now available! We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org/. _Rhombus is a general-purpose programming language that is easy to use and uniquely customizable._ As of this release:: A...
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The consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
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A physics engine with incremental rollback for multiplayer games
We want Easel to be powerful enough to make the kinds of games you would play for hours.
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TigerBeetle Core System Architecture: Deconstructing Performance Engineering
An in-depth technical analysis of TigerBeetle's core architecture, exploring how static memory allocation, zero-copy io uring interfaces, and Zig-based…
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F# 10
Learn about new F# 10 language features, performance upgrades, and tooling improvements shipping with .NET 10.
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Two studies in compiler optimisations
A deep dive into the intricacies of the LLVM optimisation pipeline.
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Pushing and Pulling: Three reactivity algorithms
It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them. I want to look at three ways of building reactive engines: push reactivity, pull reactivity, and the hybrid push/pull combination that is used in a bunch of web frameworks…
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Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML
Converting Org to HTML with (ice-9 peg) in Guile: OrgWebAlchemy
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The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
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Rathbun's Operator
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
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From Rust to Ruby
Who does things like that?!? Apparently: me. I have my own project, written in Rust. Not a big one, mind you, maybe approx. 30k lines of code in total. Rust is verbose so it’s not really that impressive. I’ve put it aside for some time and was toying with local inference, LLMs, writing agents and my attention was…
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Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
If you do Linux systems programming, you will have likely pored over man pages, either on the command line or, my personal preference, using the excellent man7.org or linux.die.net. I’ve always seen …
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Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code
Parsing a statistics textbook with Deepseek OCR on Modal
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Bez: Generating a browser engine from specs and tests
Repository bez by burrito.space on Tangled.
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Gzip decompression in 250 lines of Rust
i wanted to have a deeper grasp of how compression works, so i wrote a gzip decompressor from scratch. the result is about 250 lines of rust that can decompress gzip from a file or stdin.
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MCP 2026-07-28 Specification: transport going stateless
The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification is out, bringing a stateless protocol core, Multi Round-Trip Requests, header-based routing, cacheable list results, authorization hardening, a formal extensions framework, and updated Tier 1 SDKs.
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Stinkpot: SQLite-backed shell history
sqlite-backed shell history
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Gemma-4-26B-A4B with 39-69% less thinking at same accuracy
This is the fifth model in the ThinkingCap series. We reduced how much Google's gemma-4-26B-A4B-it thinks, without compromising the quality of its answers.
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The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs
Who is the Assistant? We investigate the character that most modern language models inhabit when interacting with users.
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C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
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Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
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The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
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Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.
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Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.