A University of Colorado mathematician solved the mathematical model behind the Eiffel Tower's shape by studying Gustave Eiffel's historical writings about wind resistance. Patrick Weidman discovered that Eiffel designed the tower by balancing wind pressure with internal tension, using geometric principles rather than a single overarching equation.
A Hacker News discussion asking what tasks remain difficult despite AI advances, questioning the perception that AI is rapidly solving all major problems across mathematics, science, and engineering.
A job board listing 1,093 positions across engineering, product, sales, and operations roles at various companies. Positions include infrastructure engineers, data engineers, product managers, and account executives, with assessment methods ranging from take-home assignments to pairing interviews.
Origami artist SiestaOrigami folded a single 124-centimeter sheet of paper into a detailed working-looking typewriter over 24 hours without cutting. The project required meticulous planning to transform the flat surface into a three-dimensional mechanical structure with intricate keyboard details and mechanical elements.
Since late 2025, developers have increasingly relied on AI coding agents, but the author distinguishes between personal and production work: for personal projects, they skip code review, but for production code they remain deeply involved—understanding requirements, reviewing diffs, and maintaining system knowledge to diagnose and fix bugs when things break. The author argues developers should be responsible humans in the loop rather than becoming mere proxies.
The article argues that managers function as catalysts in technology organizations by lowering the activation energy needed for change, and that recent industry trends declaring management dead have backfired—notably at Facebook, where dramatic manager reductions led to a 40% increase in incidents and declining team sentiment despite higher code output. The author contends that good management has become essential as the industry moves beyond the easy-growth 2010s.
AI is automating entry-level engineering work, creating a future shortage of senior engineers. Companies must invest in mentoring junior engineers now or face a workforce crisis in a few years, as the traditional pipeline for developing seniors through hands-on learning disappears.
X posts from September 18, 2026 discuss MoE inference engineering and Kyber Network's trading philosophy. The posts garnered moderate engagement with likes and replies.
Diogo Almeida and team released Jev, a new frontier AI model trained using RLCD methodology, which outperforms Astra, Fable, and Opus on radiofrequency engineering tasks with claimed 20-200x faster performance.
An engineer from Pune reflects on his 14-year career path, beginning with a two-year gap after leaving his degree to work assembling computers. He describes how this detour—working with his friend building and selling PCs, and witnessing his sister's IT career—ultimately led him to software engineering, shaped by family influence and early mentors.
Craft is a collection of design engineering essays by Gustavo covering practical concepts across performance, typography, color, layout, motion, sound, and data visualization. The resource presents short guides on design tricks and useful ideas rather than comprehensive documentation, with most articles marked as coming soon.
An article exploring how AI agents can automate software development work. While agents have shown promise in specific tasks, most real software work still requires human engineers; the field is moving past initial hype to identify where agents excel (bug fixes, debugging) versus where human creativity matters most (killer features, architecture decisions).
This article outlines 10 foundational pillars for building codebases that enable AI agents to work more competently and efficiently, including end-to-end types, static analysis, context-enriched logging, test isolation, runtime mutability, programmable orchestration, modularity, terseness, documentation, and strategic comments. The principles mirror best practices for human engineers but have amplified benefits for agents by providing structural enforcement and reducing runtime errors.
Artificial Analysis released Capability Indices v1.1, updating domain-specific AI model evaluations across finance, legal, healthcare, engineering, and other sectors. The update incorporates stronger evaluations from Intelligence Index v4.3, adds agentic tool use benchmarks, and removes customer interaction metrics across most domains.
Weave is experimenting with using AI agents on a prediction market exchange to price the impact and utility of code pull requests, leveraging a central limit order book where agents can buy and sell based on their assessments of a PR's value relative to engineering time investment.
A Hacker News user asks about assembling technical engineering teams, noting that while recruiting experienced developers they've worked with is straightforward, finding additional candidates becomes time-consuming and exhausting. They seek advice from others who have successfully built high-performing technical teams on what challenges they faced and what strategies they changed.
A new book titled 'The Secret Life of Circuits' has been published and is now available for order. The book serves as a practical reference guide to electronics and circuit design, featuring over 300 diagrams and illustrations in a full-color hardcover format, with orders shipping directly from the publisher and through major retailers including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve uses salt caverns in salt domes along the Gulf of Mexico to store hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil. This solution elegantly meets key requirements: long-term storage capacity, security against attacks, rapid release capability, and low maintenance costs over decades. Salt caverns offer advantages over alternatives like external floating roof tanks or underground concrete facilities in terms of scale, cost, and protection.
Security engineering is fundamentally changing as automation makes vulnerability investigation—historically the time-consuming core of the work—increasingly feasible to automate. While human expertise in understanding business logic and complex systems remains valuable, the economic advantage of experienced engineers' intuition about where to look for vulnerabilities is diminishing as machines can cheaply explore multiple hypotheses simultaneously.
The square–cube law, first described by Galileo in 1638, is a mathematical principle stating that as an object's size increases, its volume grows faster than its surface area. This has significant real-world applications in engineering and biology, explaining phenomena from heat dissipation in mammals to structural limits in buildings and vehicles.