1201
We are rebuilding Monica
We are rebuilding Monica from scratch, and this new series will document how.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,415 posts.
1202
Dear Software Makers
Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube” . I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where…
1203
DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
Why Domain-Specific Languages and good abstractions make LLM code generation reliable and reviewable.
1204
Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
I never questioned why code should be highlighted until I tried to make my own theme.
1205
Why we built our own background agent
The craft of engineering is rapidly changing. We built our own coding agent to accelerate faster. Inspect is now open to teams outside Ramp through early access.
1206
The Shape of Inequalities
…symmetry isn’t just a preference for “pretty” shapes. Contents Introduction The HM-GM-AM-QM Inequality The two circles The Semicircle The Container The 3D container The Sum of Squares Inequality Nesbitt’s Inequality Conclusion Introduction While I was randomly browsing the web, I came across this nice picture: Roland…
1207
The Token Compression Illusion: Why I'm Skeptical of RTK
RTK promises dramatic token savings for coding agents, but raw terminal compression is not the same as cheaper, safer, or more accurate software engineering.
1208
The largest number representable in 64 bits
This post is a rewrite of my earlier blog post from Nov 2023 with new insights and updates.
1209
Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy
Want to follow along with Rust development? Curious how you might get involved? Take a look!
1210
Signing data structures the wrong way
Domain separation bugs have bitten Bitcoin, Ethereum, TLS, and AWS. Snowpack solves this by embedding random domain separators directly in the IDL.
1211
Rust Threads on the GPU
At VectorWare , we are building the first GPU-native software company . Today, we are excited to announce that we can successfully use Rust's std::thread on the GPU. This milestone marks a significant step towards our vision of enabling developers to write complex, high-performance applications that leverage the full…
1212
Spatial languages: Writing code in 2D
Writing code in 2D: a spatial programming language with vertical operands, quantum uncomputation puzzles, and a 3-bit adder in a single 2D expression.
1213
Io_uring Without Readahead
Someone opened a PR to implement readahead in Turso. It was a throwaway implementation, but a good excuse to measure io_uring and understand more about it.
1214
Reproducing DeepSeek's MHC: When Residual Connections Explode
DeepSeek replaced standard residuals with massive Hyper-Connections, and then watched them explode. I reproduced the 9x signal amplification to understand their fix: the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. Part 1 of 2.
1215
Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998
A 3.8B model pretrained from scratch to 0.384 CORE on 65B tokens in 43 hours, for $998.
1216
Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple and Fast
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
1217
Unsigned sizes: A five year mistake
C3 is the ergonomic, safe evolution of C. Familiar syntax, full ABI compatibility, optionals, slices, contracts and zero-cost abstractions.
1218
No LLM Code in Dependencies
I've spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far.
1219
A Trampoline
I didn’t want to buy a trampoline. It wasn’t the money.
1220
Claude's Load-Bearing Seams
Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier.Claude's load-bearing seams
1221
Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary
If you have Chrome Canary installed with the 'Experimental Web Platform features' flag enabled, you can now try out a new HTML meta tag:
1222
Building Principia for Windows XP
Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it given that the…
1223
A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025)
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here .
1224
Rust's derive often implies inline
In Rust, one of the most common ways to implement core traits (like Debug , Display , and Clone ) is to #[derive(...)] them, e.g.:
1225
Common Lisp Development Tooling
A beginner's exploration of the many layers of Common Lisp development environments.
1226
Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer (2024)
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
1227
The occasional ECONNRESET
Two services running on the same machine. One of them opens a listening TCP socket bound to localhost, the other one connects to that. They exchange data. Every now and then , the service that initiated the connection gets an ECONNRESET while reading data from the socket -- but no other errors show up in the logs, no…
1228
The Two Abstractions of System Design: Hide or Reduce
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
1229
A blueprint for formal verification of Apple corecrypto
With the latest release of corecrypto, we’re publishing our implementations of quantum-secure ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms, along with the mathematical proofs we built to assure they are faithful to the FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 specifications. To advance the state of the art for assuring critical software, we're also…
1230
1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
We usually learn that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 kilobytes, etc. But is this true or a kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?