The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,536 posts.
An interactive exploration of quadtrees. Start with brute-force spatial search, build recursive space partitioning step by step, then use it for point lookups, range queries, nearest-neighbor search, collision detection, and image compression.
I'm building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog and blogging the process. In the previous post , we looked at how the 386 reuses one barrel shifter for all shift and rotate instructions. This time we move from real mode to protected and talk about protection .
The author of Java 26's MemoryMXBean.getTotalGcCpuTime() analyzes the CPU-memory trade-off and why pause times fail to capture explicit GC cost.
Wolfram's Foundation Tool supplements LLM foundation models with deep computation and precise knowledge. CAG (computation-augmented generation) underlies multiple access methods.
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
Righty-ho, I’m back from Rust Nation, and busily horrifying my teenage daughter with my (admittedly atrocious) attempts at doing an English accent 1 . It was a great trip with a lot of good conversations and some interesting observations. I am going to try to blog about some of them, starting with some thoughts…
Most linux software just work on FreeBSD
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my…
Magic files and where to find them: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .mailmap, .git-blame-ignore-revs, .lfsconfig, and more.
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
Applying the type-driven mindset to rust via the "Parse, don't Validate" pattern
AI agents are good at doing one thing at a time. Give Claude a focused task and it performs. But real work isn’t one task. It’s a tree of tasks with dependencies, parallelism, and context that needs to flow between them.
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
a pungent monad odor that attracts mathochists
How to delete all merged git branches locally with a single command. This one-liner has been in my zshrc since 2017 — I found it buried in the CIA's Vault7 l...
Understanding large codebase can be incredibly difficult. In this post I walk through how I learn a codebase use turbopack as my case study.
Farewell, Rust for web. For now…
To me, one of the most annoying parts of software engineering is writing code that doesn’t require thinking. It’s just a typing exercise, and that’s boring.
Python and JavaScript/TypeScript AI frameworks are reinventing what telecom solved in 1986. What 40 years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents.
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
Synchronization barriers let you test for race conditions with confidence.
You can't open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like "agentic engineering" or "openclaw" into your beautiful but disapproving face. I'm terrible at predicting the future—you should ask me about selling NVIDIA stock in early 2022 some time—but one thing seems…
About a year ago I posted about defer and that it would be available for everyone using gcc and/or clang soon. So it is probably time for an update. Two things have happened in the mean time: A tec…
A false dichotomy that hides the real request
Imagine you’re maintaining a native project. You use Visual Studio for building on Windows, so you do the responsible thing and list it as a dependency
Reverse-engineering the .car file format used by Apple's asset catalogs and how to parse it without Apple's proprietary tools
the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
