The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,536 posts.
Erlang's mailbox design is more disciplined than Go's channels: only the owning process can read from a mailbox, and sends are asynchronous. Yet the four failure modes of shared mutable state still show up, just in different shapes.
I love a good side-project. Like most geeks, I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when faced with problems - give me a minor inconvenience and I’ll happily spend weeks building something far more elaborate than the situation warrants. There’s joy in having a playground to explore ideas and “what ifs”; Building…
This one is going to be a quick one as there wasn't anything new discovered. In fact, I feel quite dumb. This is really a tale of " Do your research before acting and know what your goal is, " as you'll end up saving yourself a lot of time. Nobody likes throwing away work they've done either, and there could be…
When Mathematica seems to not to know how to simplify an expression, it may be doing the right thing, being more sophisticated than you expect.
C++26 brings us a small but meaningful cleanup to the language: deprecating ellipsis parameters without a preceding comma. This change, proposed in P3176R1, aims to improve C compatibility, reduce confusion, and pave the way for future language features. The proposal’s name is a playful reference to the Oxford comma …
A programmer's text editor is their castle
Python loses every public benchmark by 21-875x. I took the exact problems people use to dunk on Python and climbed every rung of the optimization ladder -- from CPython version upgrades to Rust. Real numbers, real code, real effort costs.
Over the course of four weeks in January and February, I built a new programming language using Claude Code. I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that. You can find the source code on GitHub , along with build instructions and example programs .
Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGO...
I read Ian Whitlock’s article on why he can’t quit Magit and it inspired me to share more about Magit from my perspective. This article will focus on rebasing.
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
Rahul's Blog
Limousin, Saint-Yrieix-la-perche, Périgord, Université, société, Livres, citations, Nantes, Jumilhac
I touched "every" OS so you don't have to
Literate programming is the idea that code should be intermingled with prose such that an uninformed reader could read a code base as a narrative, and come away with an understanding of how it works and what it does. Although I have long been intrigued by this idea, and have found uses for it in a couple1 of different…
I built a tiny programming language where programs are candy grids, complete with a renderer, photo decoder, AST tree, and execution trace.
AI coding is blurring the lines between engineers, PMs, and designers. In the short-term, it's going to cause havoc. What happens long-term?
It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them. I want to look at three ways of building reactive engines: push reactivity, pull reactivity, and the hybrid push/pull combination that is used in a bunch of web frameworks…
I’ve forgotten how to write code, or at least I think I have. Hard to be sure, I haven’t done it for a while. But then, I start to muse…
In early December 2023, I wrote a drawing program called WigglyPaint and published it on Itch.io.
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
I’m sometimes late to notice new and terrible things about macOS 26 Tahoe, because I use it only for testing, on a secondary Mac. My main Mac remains on Sequoia, as enforced by Little Snitch . I was of course aware that app windows on Tahoe have exaggerated corner radiuses, but I was unaware until now that the window…
I am not a lawyer. This is provided solely for the purposes of general information and does not constitute legal advice, guidance, or counsel. No attorney-client relationship is established by the provision of this information, and no reliance should be placed on this information in lieu of seeking professional legal…
Good software knows what problem it solves and what needs to be tackled by another tool
The four-pane System Browser has shaped Smalltalk development for forty years. It’s still brilliant at providing context. But the real problem may not be the browser itself—it may be the lack of composition between the tools that surround it.
