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A million ways to die from a data race in Go
I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
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The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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RegreSQL: Regression Testing for PostgreSQL Queries
Stop deploying broken SQL queries. RegreSQL provides regression testing for PostgreSQL queries with performance baselines and automated warnings.
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Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
This would be my website, I guess.
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A beginner's guide to extending Emacs
How to build a custom completion backend for emacs from scratch.
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The cost of Go's panic and recover
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
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JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
We replaced simple websites with complex apps nobody asked for. Now it takes a complex build pipeline just to change a headline.
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Asking AI to build scrapers should be easy right?
Skyvern now writes and maintains its own code, making AI scraper building 2.7x cheaper and 2.3x faster. Learn how explore-replay works in June 2026 (Updated).
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Xcode Constantly Phones Home
Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…
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Hilbert space: Treating functions as vectors
The tools of linear algebra are extremely useful when working in Euclidean space (e.g. \mathbb{R}^3 ). Wouldn’t it be great if we could apply these tools to additional mathematical constructs, such as functions and sequences? Hilbert space allows us to do exactly this - apply linear algebra to functions.
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Helion: A high-level DSL for performant and portable ML kernels
Introduction to Helion In modern machine learning, the demand for high-performance computation has led to a proliferation of custom kernels. While these kernels can deliver impressive performance, they are often...
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Sorting algorithms with CUDA
Building on my previous post on sorting algorithms, I implemented the same algorithms using CUDA to explore performance improvements through parallel computing. The goal is to see how we can leverage the power of parallel computing to speed up our sorting algorithms. I went for a NVIDIA recruiting event some days ago…
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An Update on TinyKVM
Hey all. TinyKVM was open-sourced this february and since then I’ve been working on some things that are very much outside of the scope of…
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Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris
Training gaming agents is an addictive game. A game of sleepless nights, grinds, explorations, sweeps, and prayers. PufferLib allows anyone with a gaming computer to play the RL game, but getting from “pretty good” to “superhuman” requires tweaking every lever, repeatedly.
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C++ says “We have try... finally at home”
The destructor serves as the "finally".
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Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
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AI coding agents are removing programming language barriers
AI coding tools are dissolving the language barriers that once defined our careers. As someone who coded exclusively in Ruby for a decade, I’m now contributing to low-level system projects I couldn’t have touched before. Here’s how AI coding agents enabled my leap from Ruby to C, C++, and Rust.
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SQL needed structure
The data on the page is presented in a hierarchichal structure. The movie page contains a director, a list of genres, a list of actors, and each actor in the list contains a list of characters they played in the movie. You can't sensibly fit all of this into a single flat structure like a relation.
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Modular monolith and microservices: Modularity is what matters
Modularity is a crucial concept when designing and creating software. Independent of whether our chosen architecture style is to have a single unit of deployment - Monolith or multiple units of deployment - Microservices/Services. It is a quality that should be treated completely independent of how many deployable…
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Deno 2.4
Deno bundle is back, alongside the addition of bytes and text imports, stabilized built-in OpenTelemetry, a new --preload flag, simplified dependency management with deno update, and more.
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My Ideal Array Language
The fundamental units of computation available to users today are not the same as they were 20 years ago. When users had at most a few cores on a single CPU, it made complete sense that every program was written with the assumption that it would only run on a single core.
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A surprising enum size optimization in the Rust compiler
Enums are one of the most popular features in Rust. An enum is a type whose value is one of a specified set of variants.
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CompileBench: Can AI Compile 22-year-old Code?
We tested 19 LLMs on their ability to handle real-world software engineering tasks like compiling old code and cross-compiling. See how Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google models stack up in our new benchmark – CompileBench.
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Rust on the RP2350 (2024)
Today sees the announcement of the latest additions to Raspberry Pi's microcontroller line-up - the RP2350 family. I've had prototype units for a while, and you can run Rust code on it today. To my knowledge this is the first ever microcontroller launch with Rust support out-of-the-box.
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Effective context engineering for AI agents
In this post, we explore strategies for effectively curating and managing their context.
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Qt Creator 18 Released
Qt Creator 18 highlights development containers to ease kit configuration, a convenient Overview tab, and various UX improvements.