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Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 154 posts.
2
Two Hard Things (2009)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
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The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
4
-2000 Lines of code (2004)
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
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Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
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Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
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Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
Get more out of Claude Code: tell Claude what it can't see, give it a check to run, and enforce the rules that can't have exceptions.
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Locality of Behaviour (2020)
Carson Gross explores the Locality of Behaviour (LoB) principle, which emphasizes making the behavior of code units obvious on inspection to enhance maintainability. He discusses the tradeoffs between LoB and other software design principles like DRY and SoC, offering insights on balancing clarity, abstraction, and…
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Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time
How many times are words, names or functions found in the Linux kernel source code? Browse an example or write your own comma-separated list to find out! You can use * for wildcards, foo|bar for sums, and a word is defined as \<[[:alnum:]_]+\> (ignoring case, considering accents).
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Comparison of C/POSIX standard library implementations for Linux
The table below and notes which follow are a comparison of some of the different standard library implementations available for Linux, with a particular focus on the balance between feature-richness and bloat. I have tried to be fair and objective, but as I am the author of musl , that may have influenced my choice of…
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The Ruby community has a DHH problem
The Ruby community can no longer afford to stand silent in the face of DHH and his toxic ideas.
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Claude Advanced Tool Use
Claude can now discover, learn, and execute tools dynamically to enable agents that take action in the real world. Here’s how.
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Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in new code quickly yields durable and compounding gains. This year we lo…
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Numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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Building Effective AI Agents
Practical guidance from Anthropic on building reliable AI agents, from simple composable patterns to fully autonomous systems.
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Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations
Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations. An update on our exploratory research on model welfare.
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Go Data Structures: Interfaces (2009)
Go's interfaces—static, checked at compile time, dynamic when asked for—are, for me, the most exciting part of Go from a language design point of view. If I could export one feature of Go into other languages, it would be interfaces.
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A 10x Faster TypeScript
Embarking on a native port of the existing TypeScript compiler and toolset to achieve a 10x performance speed-up.
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Code execution with MCP for efficient agents
Learn how code execution with the Model Context Protocol enables agents to handle more tools while using fewer tokens, reducing context overhead by up to 98.7%.
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AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
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Run a C# file directly using dotnet run app.cs
Run C# files instantly with dotnet run app.cs, no project file needed! Coming to .NET 10, try it out today in Preview 4.
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Context Rot: How increasing input tokens impacts LLM performance
Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically presumed to process context uniformly—that is, the model should handle the 10,000th token just as reliably as the 100th. However, in practice, this assumption does not hold. We observe that model performance varies significantly as input length changes, even on simple tasks…
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Run DeepSeek R1 Dynamic 1.58-bit
DeepSeek R-1 is the most powerful open-source reasoning model that performs on par with OpenAI's o1 model. Run the 1.58-bit Dynamic GGUF version by Unsloth.
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Using LLMs at Oxide
Large language models (LLMs) are an indisputable breakthrough of the last five years, potentially profoundly changing the way that we work. As with any extraordinarily powerful tool, LLM use has both promise and peril — and that they are so general-purpose leaves real questions about how and when they should be used…
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There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
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Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models (Anthropic)
We describe an approach to tracing the “step-by-step” computation involved when a model responds to a single prompt.
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How to Build an Agent
Building a fully functional, code-editing agent in less than 400 lines.
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My LLM codegen workflow
A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.