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Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer
My exploration into making a 90s style fantasy console inspired by the PS1
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
212
Elixir 1.12
Elixir v1.12 is out with improvements to scripting, tighter Erlang/OTP 24 integration, stepped ranges, and dozen of new functions across the standard library.
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Scrape like the big boys
What it really takes to scrape without getting detected.
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Ruby vs. Python comes down to the for loop
Contrasting how each language handles iteration helps understand how to work effectively in either.
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Tour of our 250k line Clojure codebase
At Red Planet Labs we’ve been quietly developing a new kind of developer tool for many years. Our tool reduces the cost of building large-scale end-to-end applications by multiple orders of magnitu…
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Turning an old Amazon Kindle into a eInk development platform
I fancied getting an eink screen to use for future projects. I bought a wee one with a raspberry pi "hat" attached. However, I realised later that I could maybe just re-purpose an old Amazon Kindle eb…
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OpenAI Codex
We’ve created an improved version of OpenAI Codex, our AI system that translates natural language to code, and we are releasing it through our API in private beta starting today.
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Software engineering research is a train wreck
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
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The Python Package Index is now a GitHub secret scanning integrator
GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI) are collaborating to help protect you from leaked PyPI API tokens. From today, GitHub will scan every commit to a public repository for…
220
Apple M1 Assembly Language Hello World
Introduction Last week, we talked about using a new Apple M1 based Macintosh as a development workstation and how installing Apple’s development system XCode also installed a large number of open s…
221
How to build large-scale end-to-end encrypted group video calls
Signal released end-to-end encrypted group calls a year ago, and since then we’ve scaled from support for 5 participants all the way to 40. There is no off the shelf software that would allow us to support calls of that size while ensuring that all communication is end-to-end encrypted, so we bui...
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OO in Python is mostly pointless
Note from 2025 me - I largely still agree with myself - and I still see the same crappy OO code getting pumped out. The final point in "Exceptions" is worth emphasising more.
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netaddr.IP: a new IP address type for Go
The Go standard library’s net.IP type is problematic for a number of reasons. We wrote a new one.
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The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
When M1 Macs were launched, a new GPU with iOS-like architecture started driving the external monitors. This meant that the old method for controlling monitors using DDC wouldn't work anymore. Apps like Lunar and MonitorControl had to find other ways to change the brightness of the monitors.
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An Unlikely Database Migration
From JSON Files to etcd: A Tailscale Database Migration Story
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Java Is Underhyped
The perspective of an ignorant computer science undergrad
230
Consider SQLite
If you were creating a web app from scratch today, what database would you use? Probably the most frequent answer I see to this is Postgres, although there are a wide range of common answers: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc. Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?
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Performance Improvements in .NET 6
Take a rip-roarin' tour through hundreds of PRs worth of performance improvements for .NET 6.
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Backdooring Rust crates for fun and profit
Supply chains attacks are all the rage these days, whether to deliver RATs, cryptocurrencies miners, or credential stealers. In Rust, packages are called crates and are (most of the time) hosted on a central repository: https://crates.io for better discoverability. We are going to study 8 techniques to achieve Remote…
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Deno v1.8 – support for WebGPU, private modules, Intl, and much more
Deno 1.8 adds experimental support for the WebGPU API, adds support for importing private modules, stabilizes import maps, revamps coverage tooling, adds ICU to provide internationalization out of the box, and a whole lot more.
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Stack Graphs
Precise code navigation is powered by stack graphs, a new open source framework that lets you define the name binding rules for a programming language.
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Exploring Clang/LLVM optimization on programming horror
Recently, I’ve come across a not so efficient implementation of a isEven function (from r/programminghorror ).
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The complexity that lives in the GUI
The user interfaces are a weird thing. There are all sorts of libraries and frameworks that are supposed to help you on your journey of writing a GUI, but despite all the best practices and frameworks forcing you to eat your vegetables, the GUI always ends up being a ridiculous mess. After pondering some more about…
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Best of show – abuse of libc
printf machine. 2020 IOCCC entry carlini - Best of Show - abuse of libc
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Gitlet.js – Git implemented in 1k lines of JavaScript (2015)
I wrote Gitlet to show how Git works under the covers. I wrote it to be readable. I commented the code heavily.
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Half a million lines of Go
By Kevin Dangoor Back in December 2019, I first wrote about Goliath, Khan Academy’s project to migrate our ... Read more
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Functors and Monads for People Who Have Read Too Many “Tutorials”
Title is literally true. This may not be the best place to learn about these concepts for the first time, because I'm going to focus on knocking down the misconceptions about them.