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Theseus, a Static Windows Emulator
An new old approach to emulation.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,416 posts.
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OpenLDK: Bringing the Java World into Common Lisp
Java classes become CLOS classes, seven JVM languages share one Lisp expression, and a saved Spring Boot application launches in 84 milliseconds.
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Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw
AI agent misbehavior isn't a sandbox problem—it's a permissions problem.
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AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation
If you compile your app for AVX2 and it runs on Windows ARM under Prism emulation, is it faster or slower than compiling for SSE2-4.x? I assumed it would be roughly the same — maybe slightly slower due to emulation overhead, but AVX2's wider operations would compensate. The
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Teaching Kids Forth
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
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Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk
Read this Tcl/Tk hands-up/primer to find out how the open-source Command Tool Language toolkit can help you develop cross-plaform tools for Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android.
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Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
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Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine
Join me as I update a project through 10 years of Unity editors. Along the way I will talk about my process, Unity tips and tricks, and the tech changes of Unity Engine - several of which I observed firsthand while working at Unity.
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Process-Based Concurrency: Why Beam and OTP Keep Being Right
What makes BEAM and OTP different from async/await, threads, and actors. Process isolation, supervisors, and why Erlang's model keeps winning 40 years later.
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The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study
A deep dive into Emacs's widget library: what it does well, where it falls apart, and a step-by-step case study of building a table widget with editable cells. Includes working code and hard-won lessons about state management, layout hacks, and cursor position preservation.
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Quadrupling code performance with a "useless" if
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
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Making ast.walk 220x Faster
Why ast.walk when you can ast.sprint? How we made Python AST traversal 220x faster while building a custom linter for Reflex's AI code generation.
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Generate QR Codes with Pure SQL in PostgreSQL
As my cat woke me up way too early for a Saturday morning, I decided to put all this extra time (and my ChatGPT Pro subscription) into good use and generated a QR-code generator for PostgreSQL, written as a single pure SQL statement. No external libraries or Postgres extension installation needed! The pqr.sql example…
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Watgo – A WebAssembly Toolkit for Go
I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go.
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Mine, a Coalton and Common Lisp IDE
By Robert Smith mine is a brand new IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp, built from the ground up with one purpose: To make Coalton and Common Lisp easier and more accessible to the programming world. TL;DR? Go to mine's homepage with downloads for Windows/macOS/Linux. mine is a complete, single-download application that…
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The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built in all the wrong ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software…
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I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year
My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores.To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there…
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Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
On why bitmap fonts still carry more life than most default tech type.
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Spoiling Linux Kernel with "sanctioned" code
Last year I've fixed a bug in Linux kernel OHCI (USB 1.1) stack , which rendered my old printer unreliable: OHCI adds artificial delay of 1ms for each USB transfer of send-read pattern, while my very old, host-based printer expects very tight timings and constant latency, like some kind of CnC machine.
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Malleable software = solid bases and custom code
In 2019 I bet on the no-code revolution. That bet aged so-so. Here is the new one.
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Message Queues: A Simple Guide with Analogies (2024)
This guide explains message queues with analogies: databases, warehouses and post offices.
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When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader
A write-up of a full shader debugging session to find out why my Voronoi Diagram shader was stuttering in one specific machine.
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Using HTTP/2 Cleartext for a server in Go 1.24
I'll give a brief outline of how to enable HTTP/2 cleartext (h2c) in a Go API server when you are using Go 1.24 or newer. This is useful in Cloud Run environments, which handles TLS termination but can take advantage of HTTP/2 features.
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How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes
Packing ternary numbers with efficient SIMD-friendly unpacking on binary computers
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Advanced coding in low-resource programming languages
Learn how OpenAI is improving ChatGPT across low-resource programming languages, with new evaluations for software engineering, SQLite, and COBOL migration.
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Pros and cons of solo development
I created and maintain Luxury Yacht, a desktop app for managing Kubernetes clusters. Think Headlamp, Lens, and k9s. It's that kind of app. Luxury Yacht is a ...
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What canceled my Go context?
How Go 1.20's WithCancelCause and Go 1.21's WithTimeoutCause let you attach a reason to context cancellation, plus a gotcha with manual cancel and the stdlib pattern that covers every path.
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Rust All Hands 2026 Retrospective
Want to follow along with Rust development? Curious how you might get involved? Take a look!
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