Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,844 posts.
In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
A recent blog post titled HTMX, Datastar, greedy developer and several Hacker News threads raised concerns about Datastar Pro, pricing, and whether features were “moved behind a paywall”. Here’s what has changed, who Pro is for, and how to achieve some of the same things with the free version.
Wow, college was such a waste of time ... when did you ever invert a binary tree outside of an interview? Honestly I never inverted a binary tree in college either ☹️
It's a justifiable copout, but it's still a copout.
std::flip is a little-known utility from the C++ standard library header <functional>: it is a higher-order function that accepts a Callable and returns an equivalent Callable with the order of its parameters reversed (or “flipped”).
C++ seems to finally converge with their contracts proposal, I decided to give it a try and come up with ideas how such a thing would look for C. This is in early stages, not a full proposal yet, a…
Over the years many people have complained about the so-called “religiosity” of some of the proponents of Test Driven Development. The recent brouhaha over TDD has, once again, brought these complaints to the fore. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about when TDD does not work.
Vim is a powerful text editor that improves coding speed & efficiency through its shortcut-based Vim language. While learning Vim can be challenging, it is a valuable skill that can enhance your career as a computer professional.
Why the last thing you should spend time on is your own software factory.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Glean is the Enterprise AI platform connected to your enterprise's data. Find, create, and automate anything. Explore what Glean can do for you!
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
I want to discuss why programming and coding are not the same, and why I can no longer support the Learn to Code movement. I can no longer tell my friends to learn coding. Although I’m passionate about it, it’s too arcane and insular for mainstream practice.
(Discussion on HackerNews)
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like "prefer composition to...
A deep dive into Google Translate (and other browser extensions) interference breaking React and other web apps.
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
On my team at Coinbase, we ask everyone to use the React performance trinity – memo, useMemo, and useCallback – all the time. For some reason, this is controversial. I’m guessing this has something to do with Twitter. This article explains why we do it anyway.
This PEP adds support for syntactic macros to Python. A macro is a compile-time function that transforms a part of the program to allow functionality that cannot be expressed cleanly in normal library code.
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.
Summary: Last year I made a list of four flaws with Haskell. Most have improved significantly over the last year. No language/compiler ecosy...
Scaling reinforcement learning, tracing circuits, and the path to fully autonomous agents
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Read Java blog posts to learn how to save on license fees, get better performance, use more secure Java, and optimize cloud costs.
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 .
