1591
Run Nix Based Environments in Kubernetes
Run reproducible, immutable environments in Kubernetes without container images. Faster deploys, SBOMs-by-default, and zero drift with Flox.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
1592
TextKit 2 – The Promised Land
After 4 years with Apple's TextKit 2: The promised 'better' text engine has unstable scrolling, unreliable height estimates, and viewport issues so bad that even Apple's TextEdit suffers from them. Good architecture, but the implementation makes it frustratingly difficult for real-world apps.
1593
Voyage-code-3
TL;DR – Introducing voyage-code-3, our next-generation embedding model optimized for code retrieval. It outperforms OpenAI-v3-large and CodeSage-large by an average of 13.80% and 16.81% on a suite …
1594
Rust: Investigating an Out of Memory Error
TL;DR: We discovered the hard way that when backtrace is enabled, the anyhow library is capturing a backtrace on every error. Only when printing this error in debug format!(”err: {:?}”, error) backtrace’s symbols are resolved to human-friendly names, thus leading to a significant memory increase for your application…
1595
Clojure Zippers (2021)
In this article, we will discuss zippers in the Clojure language. These are an unusual way to work with collections. Using a zipper, you can traverse a data structure arbitrarily and modify its content as well as search in it. A zipper is a powerful abstraction that pays off over time. However, it is not as…
1596
My Gift to the Rustdoc Team
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
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1598
The Useless UseCallback
Why most memoization is downright useless...
1599
How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)
I spent 3 weeks earlier this year digging in to and reimplementing the lossless compression algorithm in Fuji’s RAF Camera RAW files. This post discusses the fundamentals of how it works.
1600
Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days (2024)
Spoiler : it is also likely already the best BZip2 encoder for a given block size. See the green charts below. Note for subscribers: if you...
1601
Conformance checking at MongoDB: Testing that our code matches our TLA+ specs
Testing code fidelity with TLA+ specs at MongoDB. Explore conformance checking experiences and agile modelling in distributed systems.
1602
Things that have a bigger impact than coding assistants
Here are 5 factors that make a bigger difference to software development outcomes than “A.I.” coding assistants, but teams don’t address because they’re “old news, gra…
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1604
Inverting the Xorshift128 random number generator
CVE-2025-7783 is a very recent vulnerability affecting a lot of applications in the Node.js ecosystem including those which use axios or the deprecated request library. In all honesty, this vulnera…
1605
Ways to generate SSA
Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable” (though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. See this lesson from Cornell for converting Bril to SSA…
1606
PaperBench
We introduce PaperBench, a benchmark evaluating the ability of AI agents to replicate state-of-the-art AI research.
1607
How fast is Go? Simulating particles on a smart TV
The challenge, simulate millions of particles in golang, multi-player enabled, cpu only, smart tv compatible.
1608
Fixing left and mutual recursions in grammars
Left & Mutual Recursion Mitigation
1609
Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog
I have a lot in the works for the this month's Logic for Programmers release. Among other things, I'm completely rewriting the chapter on Logic Programming...
1610
Let's write a toy UI library
We begin by writing a few helper functions that will invariably prove useful to us later. We will be dealing with a lot of rectangular regions on the screen, so it makes sense to start by defining a rectangle structure and write some code to manipulate it.
1611
Fizz Buzz in CSS
How many CSS selectors and declarations do we need to produce the Fizz Buzz sequence? Of course we could do this with no CSS at all simply by placing the entire sequence as text in the HTML body. So to make the problem precise as well as to keep it interesting, we require that all text that appears in the Fizz Buzz…
1612
Zig / C++ Interop
Learn how we use macros to make it less painful to use Zig structs in C++ (and vice versa)
1613
Compiling OCaml to the TI-84 CE Calculator
In this post, I’ll explain how I compiled an OCaml program to run on a TI-84+ CE calculator. 🐪
1614
A love letter to the CSV format (2024)
why people pretending CSV is dead are wrong
1615
I stopped using AI code editors
In the past I used AI code editors for all of my programming, but I stopped using it and recommend others to consider this as well
1616
How often does Python allocate?
The answer is "very often"
1617
Node 20 will be deprecated on GitHub Actions runners
Editor’s note (August 25, 2026): Updated the Node20 removal date to September 23rd, 2026. Editor’s note (February 25, 2026): Updated the migration date to June of 2026. Editor’s note (May…
1618
Building an AI agent inside a 7-year-old Rails monolith
We run a multi-tenant Rails application with sensitive data and layered authorization. In this post, I walk through how I added the first AI agent tool using RubyLLM, Pundit policies, and our existing Algolia search, without introducing a parallel system or loosening constraints.
1619
Iterated Log Coding
I've created a new format for encoding real numbers on computers. I'm proud of it! Let's dive in.
1620
Meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity
Discussion on notions of software complexity as defined by Rich Hickey, John Ousterhout and Zach Tellman.