Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 207 posts.
April 2001, rev. April 2003 (This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb . Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the…
Build your software factory on Warp: factories as code, any model or harness, with evals, benchmarks, and self-improvement built in.
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of…
Go is an open-source programming language that focuses on simplicity, reliability, and efficiency, specifically designed to make it easy to build software at scale. Although it borrows ideas from existing languages, it has unusual properties that make effective Go programs different in character from programs written…
This post explains why Rust made sense for Discord to reimplement: how it was done, and the resulting performance improvements.
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep For more than a decade, memory safety vulnerabilities have consistently represented more than 65% of vulnerab...
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
In the ELF format there are two ways of providing a hash table of symbols. DT_HASH and DT_GNU_HASH . The first one is part of SYSV generic ABI and is well documented and marked as mandatory. DT_GNU_HASH is a newer, smaller, and faster replacement that is not documented , implemented in a few places (Glibc, GNU ld…
In an article recently linked from reddit entitled Tour de Babel you can read (among lots of other nonsense): Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way -- except, that is, for the frost thing.
I keep seeing discussions that equate zig's level of memory safety with c (or occasionally with rust!). Neither is particularly accurate. This is an attempt at a more detailed breakdown.
Today we are excited to talk about Pingora, a new HTTP proxy we’ve built in-house using Rust that serves over 1 trillion requests a day
It’s been about a year since our last update regarding Manifest v3. A lot has changed since then, not least of which has been the formation of a community group ...
Changing schemas in distributed software is hard. Could adopting bidirectional lenses help?
Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?
We’ve trained language models that are much better at following user intentions than GPT-3 while also making them more truthful and less toxic, using techniques developed through our alignment research. These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as the default language models…
(This is a modified version of the keynote talk given by Rob Pike at the SPLASH 2012 conference in Tucson, Arizona, on October 25, 2012.)
we moved from etcd to SQLite for a simpler, more scalable database solution. Learn about Litestream, live replication, and lessons learned.
The SQL language is a "standard". Even so, no two SQL database engines work exactly alike. Every SQL implementation has its own peculiarities and oddities, and SQLite is no exception to this rule.
Making performant dynamic manual memory management in C feel almost like garbage collection.
It happened. Nearly 5 years of paper writing, being snuck Committee Meeting notes on the DL until I could access them myself and absolve my co-conspirators of their sins, 5 different implementations/patches later, I can
In this article, Carson Gross explores how the term REST (Representational State Transfer) evolved to mean nearly the opposite of its original definition in modern web development. It traces how REST, originally defined by Roy Fielding to describe the web's architecture of hypermedia-driven interactions, came to be…
Commit messages matter. Here's how to write them well.
Go Generics are a long-awaited feature added in Go 1.18. This article covers how generics were implemented in Go and some surprising ways they can impact your code.
