1171
LLM that can call multiple tool APIs with one request
Learn about Cohere models' ability to perform multi-step tasks, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
1172
Try to fix it one level deeper
I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme:
1173
Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout
I often need to launch a program in the terminal in a retry loop. Maybe because it's flaky, or because it tries to contact a remote service that is not available. A few scenarios:
1174
Crafting formulas: Lambdas all the way down
We build complex mathematical formulas bottom-up using pure lambda calculus. Includes instructions of how to translate Taylor series and other approximations to lambda terms.
1175
Erlang/OTP 27.0 Release Candidate 1
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
1176
Nixiesearch: Running Lucene over S3, and why we're building a new search engine
A new search engine in 2024? Yes, but stateless — index on S3, serverless — no cluster state, with all Lucene features — filters, autocomplete, facets. And also with local embedding & RAG inference.
1177
1178
Building an email-to-calendar LLM
Talk is cheap, show me the code Introduction A common problem my friends and I have is receiving actionable emails whose priorities are medium level. They do require action of some sort ($ \geq lowest\ priority$), but the action is due in the near future ($\leq highest\ priority$). I tend to skim over these emails…
1179
Python's many command-line utilities
Every command-line tool included with Python. These can be run with python -m module_name.
1180
Ruby on Rails load testing habits
Here are the techniques I've acquired over more than 10 years of regular load testing.
1181
GCC Specs: An Introduction
If you've ever used the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) then you've worked with the gcc binary. For those who don't know, gcc is a driver, not a compiler. It runs the compiler/assembler/linker as required and coordinates the input and output between them. Use of the driver is so ubiquitous that everyone calls it the…
1182
Compiling Pattern Matching
This post intends to provide a brief overview of the algorithm described in Luc Maranget’s “ Compiling Pattern Matching to Good Decision Trees ”.
1183
1184
1185
Demystifying Git Submodules
Demystifying git submodules by showing exactly how they work.
1186
Fixing the iterative damping interpolation in video games
As I'm exploring the fantastic world of indie game development lately, I end up watching a large number of video tutorials on the subject. Even though the quality of the content is pretty variable, I'm very grateful to the creators for it. That being said, I couldn't help noticing this particular bit times and times…
1187
1188
Porting Libyaml to Safe Rust: Some Thoughts
The following is a loose collection of thoughts that came up while porting unsafe-libyaml to safe, idiomatic Rust, which may be useful to someone else who is considering "rewriting it in Rust", as the ancient journeyman prayer goes.
1189
Speech Dictation Mode for Emacs
T here is a wide range of input mechanisms for computers, starting with keyboards (which are relatively mature) and extending to various types of neural interfaces (currently under research). Speech lies somewhere on this spectrum with a lot of promises but still not much to show for. Keeping accessibility aspects…
1190
1191
Unix version control lore: what, ident
There are a couple of version control commands that deserve wider appreciation: SCCS what and RCS ident . They allow you to find out what source a binary was built from, without having to run it – handy if it is a library! They basically scan a file looking for magic strings that contain version control metadata and…
1192
A simple core.async job system in Clojure
In my off time (and my on time, for that matter) I've been working on this quirky thing I've called Scinamalink (sounds like 'skinamarink'). Scinamalink lets customers send Magic login links to their users with a single REST API call. If you don't know what a magic
1193
Docker Compose Isn't Enough
Docker Compose solves real problems in getting applications deployed. It causes problems when deploying many applications. We can do better.
1194
The Second Golden Age of Emacs
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. – Randall Jarrell
1195
Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way
If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.
1196
Systemd: Enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
1197
Venvstacks: Virtual Environment Stacks for Python
An open source utility for packaging Python applications and all their dependencies into a portable, deterministic format based on Python's `sitecustomize.py`.
1198
Visual programming should start in the debugger
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
1199
Packaging Swift Apps for Alpine Linux
While trying to build my Age Apple Secure Enclave plugin , a small Swift CLI app, on Alpine Linux , I realized that the Swift toolchain doesn’t run on Alpine Linux. The upcoming Swift 6 will support (cross-)compilation to a static (musl-based) Linux target, but I suspect an Alpine Linux version of Swift itself isn’t…
1200
Compiling with Constraints
There are lots of interesting little subproblems in compilation like instruction selection, register allocation and instruction scheduling. These can be expressed in declarative interlinked way to constraint solvers.