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A new way to think about borrow checking (in reverse)
Have you ever had a weird idea, and then it worked, but you can't really believe it?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
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Parser Combinators
Better than regex!
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I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
I built KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound LLMs and coding agents, and benchmarked the major models against it.
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It's still ok to enjoy programming
Programming is fun!
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Making a 88x31 button book using ImageMagick
Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick
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C++26: The New Debugging Header
If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else…
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I love software rendering
Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage. Why I still prefer the software renderer, and why it needs a fast PC.
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Lean now ships with verified kernels
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
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The Folders Programming Language
Created 2015 | Updated 2026 | One of Forty-Four Esolangs , by the creator of Rivulet and Velato
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Fancy Curl Sites
So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands!
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Recreational Programming
Learn more about Christopher Phiri work experience, education, connections & more. Software developer, UX/UI, Illustrator
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Monte-Carlo Simulations
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] .
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Two-Stack Sliding-Window Aggregation
An aggregation is some kind of summary of a set of data. This can be the sum, length, minimum, etc. It is quite common to want to calculate such a summary repeatedly, e.g. “the maximum noise level in dB for the past 30 seconds” for a nuisance detector. In such a case we say there is a sliding window over our data, and…
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Your C is not standard C
this is an incomplete list of some incompatibilities between c as it's written in the standard and c as it exists in the real world for people who use gcc/clang + glibc/musl.
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LittleJS is 2D and 3D now
LittleJS just got the biggest update since it launched! It is still the small, fast, dependency-free HTML5 game engine it always was. Now it also has a full 3D renderer sharing the canvas with your…
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Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
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Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many…
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A Modern Web App in C
A modern web app written in c and served the old way: CGI, SQLite and a single binary. No frameworks, no containers and no regrets.
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Fable Took My Job
Fable is cool yo, it takes jobs yo, - Dario "steve" Altman
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How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect
Measuring a commercial spatial audio processor, extracting its stereo impulse responses, and rebuilding the effect as a convolution filter on Linux.
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I'm sorry, but you still have to think
DHH, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, decided to rewrite Campfire Once from Ruby on Rails to Rust. Or rather ask a clanker to do it for him, as he can't stand reading or writing the Rust code himself. After that he added rewrites in other languages , like Elixir and Go.
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The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
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Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking
You all know me, I love exploring new memory safety approaches and blending them together in weird ways.
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I paid people to try and follow my README
Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a…
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Why are coding agents so dumb?
Models are getting better and better, while the agents that drive them languish.
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Nix wrote half of my debugger
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
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C for Rust programmers
Interesting and unexpected details for Rust programmers learning the C programming language.
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Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits
Tiger Style and matklad recommend pushing ifs up and fors down. This post looks at what the idiom actually says, where it shows up in query optimization and in the algebra of functional programs, and where the analogy stops paying for itself.
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Anti-patterns in software blogging
Effective writing for software developers