2551
You Have to Feel It
You see a series of checkboxes checked. Schedules met. Requirements satisfied. Demos delivered. It's a good day. Good job, you, good job! A promotion is in sight.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,817 posts.
2552
The Case Against PGVector
The real limitations of pgvector in production: index choice between IVFFlat and HNSW, why real-time search is hard, pre- vs post-filtering pain, how performance degrades at scale, and when a dedicated vector database is the better call.
2553
Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
2554
The Story Behind “100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them”
The Story Behind 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
2555
Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code
Full-text search is everywhere. From finding a book on Scribd, a movie on Netflix, toilet paper on Amazon, or anything else on the web through Google (like [how to do your job as a software engineer](https://localghost.dev/2019/09/everything-i-googled-in-a-week-as-a-professional-software-engineer/)), you've searched…
2556
Elixir 1.11
Elixir v1.11 is out with improvements to the compiler and tighter integration with Erlang/OTP.
2557
A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
2558
A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
SSH port forwarding explained in a clean and visual way. How to use local and remote port forwarding. What sshd settings may need to be adjusted. How to memorize the right flags.
2559
Abusing Go's Infrastructure
I apologize if this information is already known, but I couldn’t find any references about it and I wanted to understand what was going on and share with you because I think there is some value doing it. In case this wasn’t known, I apologize to the Go team for not talking to them first and jumping the full disclosure…
2560
Exercises in Programming Style
In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes. The book consists of a simple program implemented in 33 different programming styles…
2561
Why we switched from Python to Go
Deciding on a programming language is always a difficult choice, learn why Stream switched from Python to Go as our language of choice.
2562
How I implemented my own crypto
Despite advice to the contrary, I have implemented my own crypto for serious use. Here's how.
2563
I Like Makefiles
Fancy new build tools come and go, but I think I will stick with using makefiles to orchestrate everyday tasks in my projects.
2564
You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?
Discussions: Hacker News , Lobster.rs , /r/programming . I've got great suggestions from the comments, see the addendum at the end!
2565
First Impressions with GPT-4V(ision)
In this guide, we share findings experimenting with GPT-4 with Vision, released by OpenAI in September 2023.
2566
Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
2567
Finding a new software developer job
For the first time ever, I was laid off, and had to find a new software developer job. I managed to find a new one, but it took longer than I thought, and it was a lot of work. I was in contact wit…
2568
My least favorite Rust type
Idx is typically an integral type, but you can make a Range of anything, which will become important later. Here’s a range of Unit:
2569
How I operated as a staff engineer at Heroku
I was incredibly lucky to spend 5 amazing years at Heroku. By the end of my time, I was operating in a Staff capacity, although I’m honestly completely uncle...
2570
A bug saved the company
Fortune favors the buggy?
2571
I Wrote My Fastest Hashtable
I had to get there eventually. I had a blog post called “I Wrote a Fast Hashtable” and another blog post called “I Wrote a Faster Hashtable.” Now I finally wrote the fastest…
2572
An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re…
2573
2574
Android App Reverse Engineering 101
Learn to reverse engineer Android applications!
2575
Writing an LLM from scratch, part 8 – trainable self-attention
Moving on from a toy self-attention mechanism, it's time to find out how to build a real trainable one. Following Sebastian Raschka's book 'Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)'. Part 8/??
2576
What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, ORMs are more detriment than benefit. In short, they can be used to nicely augment working with SQL in a program, but they should not replace it.
2577
C Isn't a Programming Language Anymore
Phantomderp and I have both recently been very aligned on a particular subject: being extremely angry about C ABIs and trying to fix them . Where we’re not aligned is why we’re mad about them.
2578
Why are we so bad at software engineering?
From XKCD, released under the Creative Commons 2.5 License An app contributed to chaos at last week's 2020 Democratic Iowa Caucus. Hours after the caucus opened, it became obvious that something had gone wrong. No results had been reported yet. Reports surfaced that described technical problems and inconsistencies…
2579
How I build software quickly
Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small changes. Practice specific skills.
2580
Rust concepts I wish I learned earlier
This past month, I have been enthralled by the Rust programming language given its unique edge for writing memory-safe, modern programs. Over the years, several languages have emerged as the most preferred by engineers to write resilient, backend software. The tides have shifted from Java/C++ into Go and Rust, which…