91
What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 106 posts.
92
The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …
93
I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
94
Vulnerability research is cooked
Vulnerability discovery has always been gated by elite attention. Elite attention is now abundant. What happens next?
95
Jujutsu megamerges for fun and profit
A practical guide to creating and maintaining powerful megamerge workflows in Jujutsu for faster, conflict-free development.
96
SQLite as a Document Database (2020)
However recently it added a killer feature: generated columns . (This was added in 3.31.0, released 2020-01-22.)
97
Separating signal from noise in coding evaluations
A new analysis from OpenAI reveals issues in SWE-Bench Pro, a popular coding benchmark, raising concerns about reliability and accuracy in evaluating AI models.
98
Making deep learning go brrrr from first principles (2022)
So, you want to improve the performance of your deep learning model. How might you approach such a task? Often, folk fall back to a grab-bag of tricks that might've worked before or saw on a tweet. "Use in-place operations! Set gradients to None! Install PyTorch 1.10.0 but not 1.10.1!"
99
Monte-Carlo Simulations
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] .
100
SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads
A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.
101
The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs
Who is the Assistant? We investigate the character that most modern language models inhabit when interacting with users.
102
Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple and Fast
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
103
How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes
Packing ternary numbers with efficient SIMD-friendly unpacking on binary computers
104
Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix
I have come to appreciate coding agents to be valuable tools for working with computer program code in any capacity, such as learning about any program’s architecture, diagnosing bugs or developing proofs of concept. Depending on the use-case, reviewing each command the agent wants to run can get tedious and…
105
Orthodox C++ (2016)
Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
106
JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation
Improve startup and warmup time by making optimized native code for an application instantly available when the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine starts. Achieve this by compiling application code to native code in a training run, storing the native code in the AOT cache for use in subsequent production runs. If the…