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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,815 posts.
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Deno Joins TC39
Deno has joined the JavaScript standards committee to improve the language for everyone.
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Thread: Tech we can’t use or teach?
Random thoughts, articles and projects by a chronic overengineer.
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Multiprocess Firefox
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
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How I gained commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes
This issue was publicly disclosed on the Homebrew blog at https://brew.sh/2018/08/05/security-incident-disclosure/
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Put the DVD logo in the corner (2023)
A blog about making a game to achieve my childhood dream (of getting the DVD logo in the corner)
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What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
In shell scripting you sometimes come across comparisons where each value is prefixed with "x". Here are some examples from GitHub:
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An opinionated approach to GNU Make
Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.
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What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time working on it for long stretches of time…
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Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby
Elixir is not Ruby. The familiar syntax has definitely helped the language win the hearts of the broader developer community. Yet, under the hood, Elixir is all about Erlang.
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Zellij – A Terminal Workspace and Multiplexer
After long months of work by a dedicated team of enthusiasts, today we are proud to announce the release of the beta version of Zellij
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Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
If you've talked to me lately about AI, you've almost certainly been subject to a long soliloquy about the wonders of Claude Code. What started as a tool I ran in parallel with other tools to aid coding has turned into my full-fledged agentic operating system, supporting all kinds of workflows.
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In Praise of AutoHotKey
People think it’s weird that I do all my development on a Windows machine. It’s definitely a second-class citizen experience in the wider development world, and Windows has a lot of really frustrating issues, but it’s still my favorite operating system. This is for exactly one reason: AutoHotKey. AHK is an engine for…
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Can gzip be a language model?
A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …
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Extracting concepts from GPT-4
Using new techniques for scaling sparse autoencoders, we automatically identified 16 million patterns in GPT-4's computations.
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Python and Django on Heroku
Python has joined the growing ranks of officially-supported languages on Heroku's polyglot platform, going into public beta as of today. Python is the...
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Text Summarization with TensorFlow
Posted by Peter Liu and Xin Pan, Software Engineers, Google Brain TeamEvery day, people rely on a wide variety of sources to stay informed -- from ...
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Why do arrays start at 0?
It's not the reason you think. No, it's not that reason either.
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Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?
Yes, plain Docker Compose can still run production workloads in 2026, but only if you close the operational gaps it leaves: cleanup, healing, image pinning, socket security, and updates.
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JavaScript dates are about to be fixed
Why I’m excited about the new Temporal API in JavaScript: finally, easy and accurate date handling with time zones using ZonedDateTime. Say goodbye to the headaches of traditional Date objects.
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How small is the smallest .NET Hello World binary?
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string"Hello, World!" to the standard output?
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Please do not delete this commented-out version
Let me check, just how old is Emacs 10.31? According to the Emacs timeline Emacs 13.0x was the first public release - in 1985. Feel free to study the over 30 years old sources , simply because they’re significantly more readable than what’s making up expand-file-name these days.
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My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that …
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Typing the technical interview
In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling…
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Faking a JPEG
Creating something that seems like a JPEG, very quickly
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A Recipe for Training Neural Networks
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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Java 21 makes me like Java again
Algebraic data types in Java.