The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
In software programming, the product between two integers is often computed to a fixed number of bits with overflow. Consider 8-bit integers. If you multiply 127 by 127, you get back the number 1 as an 8-bit unsigned integer, with an overflow. The actual full product is 16129. To represent 16129, you typically use 16…
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that…
When I first stumbled upon fluid simulations in game dev I was amazed on how good the effect could be. I really wan...
Who does things like that?!? Apparently: me. I have my own project, written in Rust. Not a big one, mind you, maybe approx. 30k lines of code in total. Rust is verbose so it’s not really that impressive. I’ve put it aside for some time and was toying with local inference, LLMs, writing agents and my attention was…
Co-authored-by: ur mom
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here .
A sad look at the state of modern programming books.
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs,…
Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…
C array types are weird. In this article I’ll explain what I find weird about them, what I’d do differently, and ramble on a few related things.
Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian's project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete . Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.
The website of Ike Saunders
Somewhere between 'ask Claude for a quick opinion' and 'Claude is writing our Jira tickets,' we lost the plot. AI agents are brilliant implementers. They're also confidently wrong about every decision that matters. And when it all falls over, they won't be the ones carrying the bag.
Learnings from post-AI Open Source and how we’re approaching this so far.
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
Released at the Outline Demoparty in May 2026, Ommen, NL An exploration of algorithmic density in 16 bytes of x86 assembly.
tiling window managers are wonderful. ultra-flexible text editors are also wonderful. for a spell, i thought i'd found the ideal solution in exwm … and i think it would have been, save for the fact that i use ordinary, graphical windows as much, if not more than, text buffers, and sometimes those windows are from…
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
This is the fifth installment of the 80386 series . The FPGA CPU is now far enough along to run real software, and this post is about how it works. z386 is a 386-class CPU built around the original Intel microcode, in the same spirit as z8086 .
A proposed technique for exposing an opaque data structure with idiomatic modern Python.
So, you want to improve the performance of your deep learning model. How might you approach such a task? Often, folk fall back to a grab-bag of tricks that might've worked before or saw on a tweet. "Use in-place operations! Set gradients to None! Install PyTorch 1.10.0 but not 1.10.1!"
What if we dutifully communicate the risks and trade-offs to our organizational leadership and they still want to take those risks
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
errno(2) values for the AI age
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
In this post I discuss the support for union types released in .NET 11, how they're implemented, the choices made, and how to create your own
uv's CLI feels surprisingly clunky compared to its peers like pnpm or Poetry.
