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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
OpenZL is a new open source data compression framework that offers lossless compression for structured data. OpenZL is designed to offer the performance of a format-specific compressor with the eas…
Update 2024-01-12 : Ken Shirriff has an an excellent blog post on why “cargo cult” is a poor term of art.
Learn about the new capabilities for declarative behavior on buttons.
Learn how Bun is able to cut install times by up to 25×. Bun skips Node.js's overhead with direct system calls, cache-friendly data layouts, OS-level copy-on-write, and full-core parallelism.
Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of time…
In addition to the VGA donut , I submitted two other entries in the Tiny Tapeout 8 demo competition , where you submit a "tiny" ASIC design (room for about 4000 logic gates) that outputs 2-bit RGB to a VGA port and 1-bit audio to a speaker. One was a an old school C64/Amiga intro type of thing, and the other was a…
We just completed rewriting the Ghostty GTK application fully embracing the GObject type system from Zig and also verifying with Valgrind every step of the way. The result is a more feature rich, stable, and maintainable Ghostty on Linux and BSD.
My Agent abstractions keep breaking somewhere I don’t expect.
A Gaussian splat is essentially a bunch of blurry ellipsoids. Each one has a view-dependent color, using a process similar to training an AI model, you can optimize until it converges to the photos you feed in. The result is a sort of 3D photograph that can be viewed freely from any angle. Captivated by this…
I do not pretend to have more experience or understanding than the top level engineers I often see writing blogs here, but what I am is annoyed. I love rust. It's by far my favorite language, I enjoy the community and the language ergonomics. I've been able to incorporate it into projects in my day job where fit.
In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman's talk on the EmacsConf , it was titled "What I'd like to see in Emacs". One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was "memorable names", "I think every …
When seeing the phrase “dynamic programming” in an algorithms class or leetcode study guide, the first question people ask is “what does ‘dynamic’ mean in this context?”.
Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…
a short post
Malware driving attack includes "dead man's switch" that can harm user data.
The way I was taught x86 assembly at the university had been completely outdated for many years by the time I had my first class. It was around 2008 or 2009, and 64-bit processors had already started becoming a thing even in my neck of the woods. Meanwhile, we were doing DOS, real-mode, memory segmentation and all the…
Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in new code quickly yields durable and compounding gains. This year we lo…
From DeepSeek-V3 to Kimi K2: A Look At Modern LLM Architecture Design
Sometimes software takes a long time to compile just due to how much code it has, like in the LLVM project. But often a build is slower than it could be for dumb, fixable reasons. I’ve had the suspicion that most builds are doing dumb stuff, but I had no way to see it. So I’ve been working on a cross-platform tool to…
Go team plans around error handling support
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…
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.
Creating something that seems like a JPEG, very quickly
See my follow-up article: “A Fast, Growable Array With Stable Pointers in C” I write type safe generic data structures in C using a technique that I haven’t seen elsewhere1. It uses unions to associate type information with a generic data structure, but we’ll get to that. My approach works for any type of data…
This article was adapted from a Google Tech on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT epis...
In my old age I’ve mostly given up trying to convince anyone of anything. Most people do not care to find the truth, they care about what pumps their bags. Some people go as far as to believe that perception is reality and that truth is a construction. I hope there’s a special place in hell for those people.
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
