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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,812 posts.
Skip is now free and open source
Since launching Skip in 2023, we’ve pursued one mission: enable developers to create premium mobile apps for iOS and Android from a single Swift and SwiftUI codebase — without any of the compromises that have encumbered cross-platform development tools since, well, forever.
Pi Durable
Pi Durable is a new experimental package for long-running, durable, and malleable agents that can run anywhere. A tour of what we built and why.
Best practices around creating production ready web apps with Docker Compose
Here's a few patterns I've picked up based on using Docker since 2014. I've extracted these from doing a bunch of freelance work.
Sorting Two Tons of Lego, the Software Side
All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called…
Kubernetes Failure Stories
I started to compile a list of public failure/horror stories related to Kubernetes. It should make it easier for people tasked with operations to find outage reports to learn from. Since we started w
Vector indexing all of Wikipedia on a laptop
Indexing the entirety of English Wikipedia on a laptop has become a practical reality thanks to recent advances in the JVector library that will be part of the imminent 3.0 release.
Llama from scratch, or how to implement a paper without crying
Llama from scratch I want to provide some tips from my experience implementing a paper. I'm going to cover my tips so far from implementing a dramatically...
Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?
In order to avoid accuastions of this "just being Claude defending Claude," "AI slop," "probably all hallucinations," etc., I've decided it's probably worth explaining a few key points about how this report was created:
Grok Code Fast 1
We're thrilled to introduce grok-code-fast-1, a speedy and economical reasoning model that excels at agentic coding.
Curl is C
For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →
OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Today Reuters and the Wall Street Journal both reported about rogue AI agents at OpenAI attacking RubyGems.org. https://www.rubyhack.ai/ has an amazing writeup, and you should read it. I just wanted to make a quick post about it because it’s wild. TL;DR: It seems like OpenAI Bots knew about the RubyGems caching…
Wat
This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.
URLs are state containers
A deep dive into how thoughtful URL design can enhance usability, shareability, and performance. Learn what state belongs in URLs, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical patterns for modern web apps.
WebAssembly’s post-MVP future
People have a misconception—they think that the WebAssembly that landed in browsers back in 2017—is the final version. In fact, we still have many use cases to unlock, from heavy-weight ...
Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens
[custom_views_and_hn_comments hn_id=”40015185″] My startup Truss (gettruss.io) released a few LLM-heavy features in the last six months, and the narrative around LLMs that I read on Hacker News is now starting to diverge from my reality, so I thought I’d share some of the more “surprising” lessons after churning…
The insane amount of backward compatibility in Google Maps
I still keep a couple of my favorite old smartphones. Sometimes I use one of them as my primary device for fun. Phones are among the fastest evolving markets, even a year makes a whole lot of differences. One of the biggest challenges with using old phones is the software: they don't run modern software. And old…
Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
Identify Problems Before They Become Disasters
RBS, Ruby’s new type signature language
Introducing RBS, Ruby’s new type signature language
Making a Go program faster with a one-character change
Harry Marr — Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. Co-founded Dependabot, previously at GitHub, Monzo, and GoCardless.
I accidentally Blender VSE
A bit over two months ago I started to contribute a bit of code to Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (VSE). Did you know that Blender has a suite of video editing tools? Yeah, me neither :) Even the feature page for it on the website looks… a bit empty lol.
Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python
Blog about linguistics, programming, and my projects
Git git git git git
Ever found you’ve accidentally entered too many gits in your terminal and wondered if there’s a solution to it? I quite often type git then go away and come back, then type a full git status after it. This leads to a lovely (annoying) error out the box: $ git git status git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git…
There Are No Bugs, Just TODOs
One of my life’s traumas is the bug trackers, the issue trackers, the project management tools. The toolset that completes the version control log to form the development equivalent of double-entry bookkeeping .
Pandas 1.0
These are the changes in pandas 1.0.0. See Release notes for a full changelog including other versions of pandas.