Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
After writing about Open Source And Responsibility , I’d like to share a small collaboration hack I came up with last year. Here it is:
Andrej has invited me to write about certain surprising functional programs. The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “ Cantor space ” of infinite sequences of binary digits. I have included references at the end. A weak form of exhaustive search amounts to checking whether…
Prompt Engineering, also known as In-Context Prompting, refers to methods for how to communicate with LLM to steer its behavior for desired outcomes without updating the model weights. It is an empirical science and the effect of prompt engineering methods can vary a lot among models, thus requiring heavy…
I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles:
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
Jujutsu (`jj`) is a new version control system from a software developer at Google. I have been using it full time for 6 months. Here’s why you should switch, too.
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
My twitter feed has recently been filled with discussions about the following program #include <cstdlib> typedef int (*Function)(); s...
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
In this post, I’ll iteratively optimize an implementation of matrix multiplication written in CUDA.My goal is not to build a cuBLAS replacement, but to deepl...
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
So the other day I both defined Tcl procedures all by myself and used them interactively, and I liked it, to the point where it felt like some kind of local optimum. This entry is an attempt to cope with the trauma of liking Tcl, by means of rationalizing it. I'll first tell the story of my fascinating adventures, and…
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
(To follow my compiler related posts, either subscribe to my main RSS feed, or the compiler specific one )
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
No general procedure for bug checks will do. Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you cannot tell if computation will stop. For imagine we have a procedure called P that for specified input permits you to see whether specified source code, with…
October 1997: It has been six years since I finished Paradigms of AI Programming (or PAIP ), and now seems like a good time to look back at how Lisp and AI programming have changed.
