Hacker News with Generative AI: Software Engineering

Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do? (ycombinator.com)
I'm the lead software engineer at a company building a B2B hardware/software product in the US. Great team, great technology, great PMF and good progress on revenue targets. There are lots of opportunities for how to develop the product further. It's been an extremely hard scale-up but we are finally starting to see it pay off.
Artificial Intelligence, Business, Leadership, Software Engineering
99 points by throwaway778 1 day ago | 111 comments
Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source (cncf.io)
When a company contributes a project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it’s not just sharing code—it’s making a commitment to the open source community.
Open Source, Cloud Computing, Security, Software Engineering
114 points by tomncooper 2 days ago | 34 comments
Someoen accidentally saved half a million-dollars (mataroa.blog)
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
Business, Money, Software Engineering, Career
45 points by jeeybee 2 days ago | 4 comments
YAGRI: You are gonna read it (scottantipa.com)
YAGNI, or, You aren't gonna need it, is a standard piece of advice that warns against over engineering and building too many features too early. I think its great and saves you from wasting time, which can kill a project.
Software Development, Software Engineering, Programming, Productivity
318 points by escot 2 days ago | 151 comments
Bloat – Rob Pike (docs.google.com)
Programming, Software Engineering, Design
7 points by valyala 3 days ago | 0 comments
The Problem with Modern Engineering Isn't Speed. It's Chaos (earthly.dev)
Last year, our team spent a lot of time interviewing fellow Platform, DevOps, DevEx, CI/CD, and SRE engineers, as well as engineering leaders, in order to better understand their day-to-day challenges.
Software Engineering, Chaos Engineering, DevOps, CI/CD
55 points by mifydev 3 days ago | 46 comments
Lessons learned operating petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters: Part II (tinybird.co)
This is the second part of the series. Here's more of what I've learned from operating petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for the last 5+ years.
ClickHouse, Databases, Big Data, Software Engineering
57 points by javisantana 5 days ago | 2 comments
Ask HN: What did you learn too late in your tech career? (ycombinator.com)
Ask HN: What did you learn too late in your tech career?
Software Engineering, Career Advice, Technology, Personal Growth
21 points by schappim 6 days ago | 44 comments
Ask HN: Do FAANG corps have an internal Cursor? (ycombinator.com)
What's happening with AI assisted programming inside each of the FAANG companies (or large unicorn startups)? Are they just using cursor et al? Do they have custom applications for vertical integration? Custom plugins?
Programming Tools, Software Engineering, FAANG
10 points by caprock 6 days ago | 7 comments
Efficient E-Matching for Super Optimizers (vortan.dev)
Modern theorem provers and optimizing compilers are built on an interesting concept: the ability to recognize when two things are equal, even if they look completely different.
Computer Science, Optimization, Theorem Proving, Software Engineering
19 points by todsacerdoti 7 days ago | 0 comments
Antithesis Driven Testing (sqlsync.dev)
I want a test system smart enough to discover the bugs I can’t anticipate.
Testing, Software Development, Software Engineering
6 points by wwilson 7 days ago | 0 comments
What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code? (luden.io)
Hi there! This is Oleg from Luden.io. We decided to have a deep and meaningful conversation about Lua programming language with Ivan Trusov, lead programmer of the video game Craftomation 101. It contains ~60,000 lines of Lua code and is made with Defold game engine.
Programming Languages, Game Development, Software Engineering
218 points by JSLegendDev 8 days ago | 142 comments
Ask HN: Software Engineers to follow who have a healthy skepticism of AI (ycombinator.com)
Curious who you all follow for thoughtful, well-balanced takes on AI, particularly in the context of software engineering.
Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Skepticism, Hacker News, Community Recommendations
14 points by wronginternet4 8 days ago | 15 comments
Solving the Nasty Code Migration Problem with Assisted AI Agents (aviator.co)
The 2024 DORA Report found that the most common use of AI in software engineering is for writing code. 67% of respondents report that AI is helping them improve their code. Developers use genAI coding assistants for smarter code completion and AI code editors for prototyping ideas and writing new functionalities.In real life, developers spend more time modifying existing code than writing new code. 
Software Engineering, Generative AI, AI Tools, Code Migration
3 points by tonkkatonka 9 days ago | 1 comments
Building the Hundred-Year Web Service (2024) (unplannedobsolescence.com)
My UtahJS talk, “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”, was put online this week! It’s about how to build software infrastructure that lasts a very long time.
Software Engineering, Web Development, Longevity, Architecture, Software Design
5 points by mpweiher 9 days ago | 0 comments
Can LLMs earn $1M from real freelance coding work? (getdx.com)
A new benchmark tests AI’s ability to complete real-world software engineering tasks.
Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Programming, Benchmarking
25 points by nickwritesit 10 days ago | 18 comments
12-factor Agents: Patterns of reliable LLM applications (github.com/humanlayer)
What are the principles we can use to build LLM-powered software that is actually good enough to put in the hands of production customers?
Generative AI, Software Engineering, Best Practices
472 points by dhorthy 10 days ago | 78 comments
Engineers who won't commit (seangoedecke.com)
Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven or synchronous way? Well, it depends: there are many strong technical reasons on each side, so it’s better to keep an open mind and not come down on either side.
Software Engineering, Collaboration, Decision Making
53 points by kiyanwang 12 days ago | 59 comments
Query Engines: Push vs. Pull (2021) (justinjaffray.com)
People talk a lot about “pull” vs. “push” based query engines, and it’s pretty obvious what that means colloquially, but some of the details can be a bit hard to figure out.
Query Engines, Databases, Software Engineering
101 points by tanelpoder 12 days ago | 9 comments
Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming? (ycombinator.com)
I would say that working as a programmer in a corporate environment is a bit similar to being paid to be a novel writer by people who don't know how to read, but absolutely want to tell you how to do your job properly.
Programming, Software Engineering, Corporate Culture
17 points by polygot 12 days ago | 49 comments
Ask HN: Best developer guides to modern AI (ycombinator.com)
Any software engineers working or seriously playing with modern llm and generative models — please share your personal top 5 resources that you think are good for fellow developers to ramp up to speed and start using them in production with some basic general understanding of how they work.
Generative AI, Programming, Software Engineering, Resources
10 points by aristofun 15 days ago | 4 comments
Bubble sort is not robust either (2024) (entropicthoughts.com)
Just after I published the previous article on bubble sort, I stumbled over another account claiming bubble sort is somehow more robust than better algorithms (emphasis mine):11 I should clarify that I generally agree with the author’s sentiment. It’s just this example that’s wrong and triggering to me.
Algorithms, Software Engineering, Computer Science
5 points by fanf2 16 days ago | 1 comments
Stop Thinking AI Agents, Start Engineering Autonomous Knowledge Operations (trustgraph.ai)
The tech world has been ablaze with talk of AI agents. We see demos of agents booking flights, writing code snippets, or summarizing articles. It's exciting, capturing the imagination with glimpses of AI performing tasks previously requiring human operations. But as we move from demos to deployment, simply thinking in terms of "agents" falls short.
Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Knowledge Management
10 points by cyberapocalypse 16 days ago | 0 comments
EngFlow Makes C++ Builds 21x Faster and Software a Lot Safer (thenewstack.io)
C++, Software Engineering, Performance Optimization, Security
10 points by TheGrizzlyDev 17 days ago | 1 comments
Ask HN: Where do you reliably find worldwide remote jobs? (ycombinator.com)
I did some research, but lots of offers seem to be ghost jobs and job boards look scammy<p>Where do you find fully remote (global) jobs in software/ML engineering nowadays?
Remote Work, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Job Hunting, Online Resources
98 points by yu3zhou4 17 days ago | 52 comments
Sculptor: Catch and fix issues as you code (imbue.com)
Sculptor is the first coding agent environment that helps you embed software engineering best practices.
Software Engineering, Tools, Coding, Software Development, Artificial Intelligence
61 points by thejash 17 days ago | 3 comments
North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500 (yahoo.com)
Fortune 500 companies have unwittingly hired thousands of software engineers who claim to be American developers but are actually North Korean citizens using stolen or fake identities.
Cybersecurity, North Korea, Employment, Deception, Software Engineering
145 points by cwwc 18 days ago | 153 comments
Software engineering laws (manager.dev)
Some of those are famous, and some are quite niche. ALL of them are super useful to engineers and managers.
Software Engineering, Management, Best Practices
4 points by sharjeelsayed 19 days ago | 0 comments
Kelsey Hightower – On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 [video] (youtube.com)
Software Engineering, Google, Technology, Careers, Video
4 points by jonas21 19 days ago | 0 comments
Make C string literals const? (wordpress.com)
Martin Uecker has started a new initiative to ensure a better const contract for C2y: change the type of string literals to a const-qualified base type, much as it is already the case in C++. Compilers support this since a very long time; some of them have this as default, some provide command line switches for that model.
C, Programming Languages, Compiler Optimization, Software Engineering, Best Practices
35 points by ingve 19 days ago | 53 comments