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Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
Qwen offers comprehensive functionality spanning chatbot, image and video understanding, image generation, document processing, web search integration, tool utilization, and artifacts.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,809 posts.
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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
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Chatto is now open source
The snappiest chat application you've ever used is now available for self-hosting.
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So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can …
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Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise
On 2026-05-11, an attacker chained a pull_request_target Pwn Request, GitHub Actions cache poisoning across the fork↔base trust boundary, and OIDC token extraction from runner memory to publish 84 malicious versions across 42 @tanstack/* packages on npm. Full postmortem.
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GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
GitHub Copilot is evolving to bring chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions, and adopt OpenAI's GPT-4.
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Atom 1.0
We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.
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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
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Attention is all you have
The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments.Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks.A...
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Bun v1.0.0
Bun is stable and ready for production.
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WASM 3.0 Completed
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming
Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.
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Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
I recently noticed that Google Docs has a pretty full-featured scripting system called Apps Script . It lets you write JavaScript to do some pretty useful things:
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Modules, not microservices
Dissecting why everybody keeps talking about microservices.
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Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
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You should write an agent
They're like riding a bike: easy, and you don't get it until you try.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic…
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(next Rich)
It is with a mixture of heartache and optimism that I announce today my (long planned) retirement from commercial software development, and my employment at Nubank. It’s been thrilling to see Clojure and Datomic successfully applied at scale.
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QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time
Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple .
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The largest Git repo
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
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Developers’ side projects
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
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Mr TIFF
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
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Write Libraries, Not Frameworks
Normally when I write about something on here I take the time to fully think-out a point, make a case, address all the major sides of the issue that I can think of, etc.
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Attention Is Off By One
Let’s fix these pesky Transformer outliers using Softmax One and QuietAttention.
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Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected
Over 1,000 NPM packages were infected using the same method as the previous attack, infecting with a fake Bun runtime. The attacker leveraged the `preinstall` script to download and execute a malicious payload, stealing sensitive information from the compromised machines.