I can program and like games
Visit probablydance.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Apr 2016 – May 2026
Software Engineering 15Math & Algorithms 7Systems & Performance 4Society, Policy & Culture 3Life, Learning & Writing 2Programming Languages 2
I recently posted a blog post about a new hash table, and whenever I do something like that, I learn at least one new thing from my comments. In my last comment section Rich Geldreich talks about h…
Hi, I wrote my new favorite hash table. This came about because last year I wrote the fastest hash table (I still make that claim) and this year one of the organizers of the C++Now conference asked…
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
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…
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successf…
Shenzhen I/O is a brilliant game. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game about programming micro-controllers. It distills programming down to the fun parts, removing the inertia, …
I have twin daughters that just turned three months old. I decided to write up the list that I wish I had before they were born. Just reasons why they cry, how to tell the cries apart, and what to …
I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes pthread_cond_s…
I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seeme…
The heap is a data structure that I use all the time and that others somehow use rarely. (I once had a coworker tell me that he knew some code was mine because it used a heap) Recently I was writin…
I’ve seen people be genuinely puzzled about why functional programming is not more popular. For example I’m currently reading “Out of the Tar Pit” where after arguing for fu…
The 2020 US election is finally over, and all the election excitement of the last week reminded me of something I had been meaning to look into: Sergey Shpilkin’s data visualizations that cle…
These days it’s a pretty bold claim if you say that you invented a sorting algorithm that’s 30% faster than state of the art. Unfortunately I have to make a far bolder claim: I wrote a …
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
Here is a rough approximation of float multiplication (source): float rough_float_multiply(float a, float b) { constexpr uint32_t bias = 0x3f76d000; return bit_cast<float>(bit_cast<uint32_…
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
I am somehow very late to learning CUDA. I didn’t even know until recently that CUDA is just C++ with a small amount of extra stuff. If I had known that there is so little friction to learnin…
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. Wha…
C++20 added minimal support for coroutines. I think they’re done in a way that really doesn’t fit into C++, mostly because they don’t follow the zero-overhead principle. Calling a…
It started off a few months ago, when my iPad suddenly couldn’t play videos any more that it had recorded. It would show the first frame, but hitting the play button wouldn’t do anythin…
Last year, 2024, we replaced four PTACs with a mini-split AC. I’ve been asked about it often enough (by neighbors, coworkers, friends) that I decided to write up the experience. Hopefully it&…