Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 217 posts.

Software Engineering
2023
181

LLM Powered Autonomous Agents

Building agents with LLM (large language model) as its core controller is a cool concept. Several proof-of-concepts demos, such as AutoGPT, GPT-Engineer and BabyAGI, serve as inspiring examples. The potentiality of LLM extends beyond generating well-written copies, stories, essays and programs; it can be framed as a…

182

Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes

I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…

184

The Transformer Family

Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of…

185

The Registers of Rust

It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…

205

Broken Ownership

In the ownership trio, we discussed 3 elements: Knowledge, Mandate and Responsibility. This article digs into various broken ownership scenarios where 1-2 of those elements are missing, what are the common symptoms and how to fix them.

209

I hate almost all software (2011)

It's unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer. At best I can congratulate someone for quickly and simply solving a problem on top of the shit that they are given. The only software that I like is one that I can easily understand and solves my problems. The amount of complexity I'm willing to tolerate is…