Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the…
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
Update for future readers: Are you looking for a way to undo something with Git? The git undo command won’t help with your current issue (it needs to be inst...
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
What is the complete path between visiting thepiratebay and sublimating an mp3 file from thin air? In this post, we'll implement enough of the BitTorrent protocol to download Debian. Look at the [Source code](https://github.com/veggiedefender/torrent-client/) or skip to the [last…
We explore how to build local-first sync on top of simple file storage
Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the …
Developing Opinions - A blog by Jimmy Breck-McKye
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
Xe Iaso's personal website.
Imagine you wrote a program for a pleasingly parallel problem, where each thread does its own independent piece of work, and the threads don’t need to coordi...
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
This is old! When I wrote it, I was a very different person.As it turns out, growing up a bit made me care a lot less about the nuances of Rust programming.
Open Source, Web Development, and more
A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.
I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four column version of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to repost this here so it is easier to discover.
When good regexes go bad
When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…
I recently got a new Macbook, and began setting up the Nix package manager to install my developer toolset. I mainly did this to try and have a working setup without installing Homebrew. Since I ran into a few issues, I wanted to briefly document what I did and why in case others wanted to try the same. Why Nix? (and…
All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called…
For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Okay, let's see what we've got. Two sets of annotated training materials. Six books. Over four dozen online videos. Some 80 articles, inter...
TL:DR; Java is still available at zero-cost , you just need to stop using Oracle JDK and start using an OpenJDK build, such as this one o...
Es el disco de Odín. Tiene un solo lado. En la tierra no hay otra cosa que tenga un solo lado.
