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Whose code am I running in GitHub Actions?
I wanted to know what third-party code I was using in my GitHub Actions. I was able to use standard text processing tools and shell pipelines to get a quick tally.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,204 posts.
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Why is C the symbol for the speed of light? (2004)
"As for c , that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c , the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas , the Latin word meaning speed." Isaac Asimov in "C for Celeritas (1959)" [1]
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My Favorite C++ Pattern: X Macros (2023)
In this post, I talk about my favorite C/C++ pattern involving macros.
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If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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What Killed Innovation?
I entered the data visualization field in 2012, when D3.js had just come out and interactive graphics were going through a digital Renaissance. By the time I was fully steeped in the field in 2016, it felt like a new, experimental project was coming out every week—each one pushing the boundaries of how we think about…
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Entropy Attacks
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.
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How I Choose What to Work On (2023)
A reader, "Moo", asked me to write about my process for entrepreneurship and how I choose what to write on. Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at...
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Optimizing Matrix Multiplication on RDNA3
Writing Super-Fast Matrix Multiplication with HIP, RGP, and ISA
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Writing your own C++ standard library from scratch
The C++ standard library (also know as the STL) is, without a doubt, an astounding piece of work. Its scope, performance and incredible back...
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A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed My Mailchimp Mailing List
You know when you're really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That's me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported
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Reflecting on WikiTok
Civil Engineer and Software Developer
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Cottagecore Programmers
Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some…
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An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark
Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem.
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I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud
This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed…
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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
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Writing a tiny undo/redo stack in JavaScript
I’ve needed this before - a couple of times. Third time I figured I needed something small, nimble - yet complete. And - at the same time - wondering about how to do it in a very simple manner. I think it worked out great, so let’s dig in. Most UIs will have some form of undo functionality. Now, there are generally…
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63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide (2024)
Not one cuisine, not eight, but many more. Our best shot at a comprehensive-ish guide.
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Move on to ESM-Only
Three years ago, I wrote a post about shipping ESM & CJS in a single package , advocating for dual CJS/ESM formats to ease user migration and trying to make the best of both worlds. Back then, I didn’t fully agree with aggressively shipping ESM-only , as I considered the ecosystem wasn’t ready, especially since the…
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Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd
Finally, Podman has a Docker Compose alternative
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The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re…
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A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an ...
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Achieving Great Privacy with Safari
Browsers have always been an arena for fighting and flaming over why your browser is the best and has the most features, while all others are inferior and un...
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Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds
Just kidding. Of course, I have something to say about this. In the company, we look at the art of Homeworld from time to time and bow to the creators of this masterpiece. Once, we talked about how great the background look and how interesting this sketched style is. There is something…some details seem…special to us:
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
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Heap-overflowing Llama.cpp to RCE
Retr0's Threat Research
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Bitter Lesson is about AI agents
The Race for AI Progress In 2019, Richard Sutton, wrote his groundbreaking essay titled ‘The Bitter Lesson’. Simply put, the essay concludes that systems which get better with higher compute beat the systems that do not. Or specifically in AI: raw computing power consistently wins over intricate human-designed…
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A (Long) Peek into Reinforcement Learning
[Updated on 2020-09-03: Updated the algorithm of SARSA and Q-learning so that the difference is more pronounced. [Updated on 2021-09-19: Thanks to 爱吃猫的鱼, we have this post in Chinese].
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Ruby, Ractors, and lock-free data structures
This story is about concurrent data structures in the context of Ruby. The goal here is to demonstrate how true parallelism can be achieved with global mutable state (which at the time of writing, is not supported by built-in Ruby primitives).