4891
A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive
But this is slow! With 1,000,000 applications and 1000 users uniformly distributed on both columns, it takes over 100ms. 1
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,194 posts.
4892
A simple habit that saves my evenings
As a software engineer, I often work on big tasks that require hours of continuous and focused work. However, we have plenty of meetings, colleagues asking us something in Slack, and lunch breaks. Add a colleague who comes to you and calls you for a cup of coffee if you work from the office. And usually, we don’t…
4893
What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun.
4894
90%
AI is writing 90% of the code I was in charge of
4895
Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute
A little walkthrough on an image decoder algorithm's high-level optimization, in order to make more digestable for a 6502 processor.
4896
What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
4897
Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)
With a map!
4898
Go ahead, write the “stupid” code
When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TAFE (this is like a trade school in Australia, though…
4899
VMScape and why Xen dodged it
ETH Zürich’s new VMScape attack hit KVM and VMware, but Xen’s microkernel-like design kept it out of reach.
4900
Testing “Exotic” P2P VPN
My standard "everyday" solution when it comes to connecting computers into a single network is Wireguard. Wireguard is good, supports p2p, and generally has no downsides.
4901
The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming
Read THE WEIRD CONCEPT OF BRANCHLESS PROGRAMMING on sanixdk.xyz
4902
Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
We are in the midst of a Ruby drama for the ages. I'm sure a bunch of people figured we were all too old for this shit, but apparently we are not. This debate…
4903
The AI coding trap
If you ever watch someone “coding”, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard.
4904
When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
Last month I have been on a multi-day hike with my dad. Each of us took many pictures, and when we came back we put them all in a shared folder. We both have Android phones, and the naming scheme used for our pictures was the same: IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss followed maybe by some other numbers and then a .jpg . Here YYYY…
4905
Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
Posts and writings by Julian Schrittwieser
4906
Beyond OpenMP in C++ and Rust: Taskflow, Rayon, Fork Union
Most C++ and Rust thread pools run 10x slower than OpenMP on fork-join workloads. Fork Union closes the gap to 20% with 300 lines, dodging mutexes and CAS.
4907
Solar panels + cold = A potential problem
You purchased a new Delta Pro and looked up the specifications - Delta Pro can take up to 1600w/150v/15a of solar input. Then you buy four EcoFlow 400w Rigid solar panels to plug them in series.
4908
The (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh
Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.
4909
NSPM-7 labels common beliefs as terrorism 'indicators'
New directive targets “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” and “anti-capitalism” opinions
4910
Greenland is a beautiful nightmare
Greenland is a complicated topic here in Denmark. The former colony that is still treated a bit like a colony is something that inspires a lot of emotions. Greenland has been subjected to a lot of unethical experiments by Denmark, from taking their kids to wild experiments in criminal justice.
4911
Thoughts on Cloudflare
Thoughts on its role and impact on the web’s landscape.
4912
Users only care about 20% of your application
I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually imp
4913
Why We Think
Special thanks to John Schulman for a lot of super valuable feedback and direct edits on this post. Test time compute (Graves et al. 2016, Ling, et al. 2017, Cobbe et al. 2021) and Chain-of-thought (CoT) (Wei et al. 2022, Nye et al. 2021), have led to significant improvements in model performance, while raising many…
4914
Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
4915
Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander
Mechanical keyboards, the nerd equivalent of obsessing over ferrule weights in golf clubs, are wildly popular, and for a good reason. I've owned and used a ZSA Moonlander for some years now, and here are my thoughts on it and why I think you should literally buy any mechanical keyboard you can get your hands on with…
4916
How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)
I spent 3 weeks earlier this year digging in to and reimplementing the lossless compression algorithm in Fuji’s RAF Camera RAW files. This post discusses the fundamentals of how it works.
4917
Open Social
The protocol is the API.
4918
Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
4919
Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D
I recently purchased the textbook “Aircraft Control and Simulation” by Brian L. Stevens, Frank L. Lewis, and Eric N. Johnson 1 . This book covers the control and simulation of aircraft. It’s really dense and frankly hard to understand. As far as aerodynamics texts go, it’s pretty typical.
4920
`std::flip`
std::flip is a little-known utility from the C++ standard library header <functional>: it is a higher-order function that accepts a Callable and returns an equivalent Callable with the order of its parameters reversed (or “flipped”).