The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
Thanks to some coworkers and David Wilson’s Emacs from Scratch playlist, I’ve been getting back into Emacs. The community is more vibrant than the last time I looked, and LSP brings modern completion and inline type checking.
Write-only blogging
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
*This post has been significantly updated since it was originally written. The most recent update was in September 2026; a …
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
Learn how to add type safety to object IDs in a TypeScript codebase using template literal types.
It's well known that syscalls are expensive. And that software mitigations against CPU bugs (such as Meltdown) even have made them more expensive. But how expensive are they really? To begin to answer this question I wrote a small micro-benchmark in order to measure the minimal costs of a syscall …
Over the past couple months I’ve discovered a couple of handy tricks for working with GDB breakpoints. I figured these out on my own, and I’ve not seen either discussed elsewhere, so I really ought to share them.
How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux…
My own concatenative programming language
Late last year, I had an idea that’s been steadily brewing in my head. I’ve found myself with some free time recently (it coincided with vacation, go figure), and I’ve hacked together some proof-of-concept code. Whether or not it is actually proving the concept I’m not sure, but the results are somewhat interesting…
Since I haven't published anything in almost two months, let me jot down one thought that has come to mind frequently over the past few months.
🔰If CRDTs are new to you, here are some introductory links. - An interactive intro to CRDTs [https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts/] - An introduction to state-based CRDTs [https://www.bartoszsypytkowski.com/the-state-of-a-state-based-crdts/] - CRDTs for non-academics…
I first encountered Jenkins in 2007 while contributing to the Apache Nutch project. It was called Hudson back then. The nightly builds for the project ran on Hudson at that time. I remember sifting through my emails and reviewing build result notifications to keep an eye on the patches that got merged into the trunk…
I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum , the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the…
Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.
Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.
I was at cfgmgmtcamp 2019 in Ghent, and did a talk which I think was well received about the need for some Kubernetes configuration management as well as the solution
I wrote the analysis of “useless sugar” features of Ruby for two months, and I regret nothing.
This post announces SaberVM, an abstract machine for functional programs that guarantees safety, reliability, and portability.
Creating standalone Linux applications with lone.
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
Creating fake signed commits
Asking it to repeat "ponyuseRal ponyuseRal ponyuseRal pony" makes API requests fail
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
Let's talk about shell history.
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
