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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,416 posts.
I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation…
QBE 1.3 took a while to cook, but it is the most significant release since 1.0 with around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones. In addition to the usual bug fixes, QBE gained a new and original IL matching algorithm, new optimizations from Roland Paterson-Jones, Scott Graham added support for the Windows ABI…
Today, it’s my great pleasure to announce the first public release of Hardwood, a new parser for the Apache Parquet file format, optimized for minimal dependencies and great performance. Hardwood is …
A proposal for a standard /install.md file that provides LLM-executable installation instructions.
We have significantly improved how code reviews work in Lubeno. We think code review should do more than catch bugs, it should also help teams reduce comprehension debt. In this post, I want to explain how that idea shaped our recent work on code review in Lubeno.
I've spent most of my career working inside the JVM, with a sidebar of Python. So the first time I hit incompatible libc with containerized Bifrost, and GPT suggested musl as the solution, not only did I jump on it, I moved my other Rust projects to musl as
Igor's programming blog
I am not a lawyer. This is provided solely for the purposes of general information and does not constitute legal advice, guidance, or counsel. No attorney-client relationship is established by the provision of this information, and no reliance should be placed on this information in lieu of seeking professional legal…
LittleJS just got the biggest update since it launched! It is still the small, fast, dependency-free HTML5 game engine it always was. Now it also has a full 3D renderer sharing the canvas with your…
I have come to appreciate coding agents to be valuable tools for working with computer program code in any capacity, such as learning about any program’s architecture, diagnosing bugs or developing proofs of concept. Depending on the use-case, reviewing each command the agent wants to run can get tedious and…
The personal blog of Pig Fang.
Update (28th of September 2026) Max Desiatov told me that the @c swift attribute should work, instead of declaring the functions using @_cdecl. The @c attribute marks a global function as a C function implemented in Swift, which formalizes the @_cdecl attribute. A link to the proposal is available here. I did update…
Turso is becoming the LLVM of databases: one modern, reliable Rust core with many SQL frontends. After rewriting SQLite, we are now building Postgres.
My GPU is the integrated Radeon Vega 8 that comes with my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. I tell you this so you know that my workstation is not a graphical computing powerhouse. It is, in fact, quite weak. To its credit my integrated GPU shows up as 48% faster on UserBenchmark than the GPU in my low end hardware target; a…
Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
Why the last thing you should spend time on is your own software factory.
This is shorter than some of my other posts, but I keep seeing people doing this wrong. It's even worse now in the LLM era.
Sublime Text now ships with Python 3.14 and Python 3.3. Python 3.3 is disabled by default and will be removed in a future version. If you're experiencing plugin compatibility issues you can re-enable 3.3 using the setting "disable_plugin_host_3.3": false .
In which I painstakingly remove functionality from a Linux live image. Like a normal person.
Quint - Executable specs for reliable systems
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
Ben Gesoff's personal website
Setting up a website using Elixir and Phoenix, leaning on NimblePublisher for the blog posts.
A collection of examples of how to use Common Lisp
You might find the title a little bit odd. Hold your thought for a moment and hear me out. I'm a big believer that in technology, and life, something that…
For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing novels, I spend my days as a software engineer, writing code. The software industry these days relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Because it has studied trillions of lines of publicly accessible source code, because code solves problems with testable right…
Explore how a decade of open source experiments in psychovisual modeling and compression led to JPEG XL, the future of image coding.
Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A _business_ will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.
