The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
AI changes rewrite economics because codebases with clear, common patterns get more leverage than proprietary or inconsistent systems.
The snappiest chat application you've ever used is now available for self-hosting.
Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise…
Claim: as specified, the UTS #35 transliteration-rule language is Turing-complete. This is an exception in Unicode, where algorithms are deliberately bounded and always terminate. The specification defines a revisiting cursor with no rewrite limit. ICU's implementation implements a per-call cap, but the spec itself…
IP, technology & commercial law
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
98% sounds like a lot. If someone wins the lottery 98% of the times they play, they are clearly blessed. Getting a top mark (e.g.: 10/10) on exams 98% of the time will likely lead to an honour diploma.
Literally no one is uttering what we thought were the immortal lines “learn to code,” right? I don't think that sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley
Disclaimer: An earlier version of this post claimed the structure is wait-free, this is incorrect. Being wait-free requires that failure or suspension of any thread can’t cause failure or suspension of another thread. This queue in fact does not fulfill that requirement. The main section which discusses the wait…
I created and maintain Luxury Yacht, a desktop app for managing Kubernetes clusters. Think Headlamp, Lens, and k9s. It's that kind of app. Luxury Yacht is a ...
A signals-and-noise course left me writing Monte Carlo math on paper and wishing the notation itself would run. Nine years later, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting, NoiseLang became a real Monte Carlo language that runs the same fused kernel on the GPU, on every CPU core, and on WebAssembly.
Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components
Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…
I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience . An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a thousand agents so they can do even more of that.
Over the years, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists have developed various calculi. If you have a background in computer science, you’ve likely heard of the lambda calculus, a m…
How electrons flowing through billions of microscopic switches etched into silicon become arithmetic, memory, and the software you use every day.
I've spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far.
A free browser game that teaches real Vim motions. The van is your cursor, the town is your text. Serve every customer under par.
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
A Game Boy emulator runs faster than a native interpreter by dynamically recompiling SM83 to WebAssembly, effectively making JIT possible on iOS.
Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it given that the…
Ante has taken the first step towards something we all thought was impossible: blending reference counting and borrow checking without run-time crashes. 0
If you think YAGNI is about saving effort, cheap generation should retire it. It doesn't. Here's why.
For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing novels, I spend my days as a software engineer, writing code. The software industry these days relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Because it has studied trillions of lines of publicly accessible source code, because code solves problems with testable right…
Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax.
The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
The parallel parentheses matching problem can be parallelized in different manners depending on the use case and is a good example of how stacks map to parallel hardware.
