The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.
Back in 2009 I posted a simple Mandelbrot fractal viewer on the web: a single HTML file with inline Javascript. Just 329 lines of code, each pixel a tiny table cell. Click to zoom. Watch it iterate. That was about it!
Using TypeScript and some DMV API digging, I chased down and claimed one of the rarest available license plate combinations.
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
Recently, I made a free game . It's a little mystery investigation game which I was inspired to write after enjoying games like Case of the Golden Idol , Roottrees are Dead , and Return of the Obra Dinn . I thought my UX ideas were pretty simple, so I decided to implement it in HTML5 .
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…
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
Learn the command line, version control, build systems, and correctness in NEU’s CS 4973: ISDT.
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
Ever since moving to New York City, I've found my time to be in more demand than ever. Between work, meetups, and social events, I have noticeably less time for side projects than I had before moving here. At the same time, my commute is a massive time suck. It's 30 minutes each way, which doesn't sound that bad, but…
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.
This was a fun project for a couple of days, but I will probably shelve it for now so I can continue what I was already working on before. Read on to follow along with my journey. Spoilers: I didn’t get very far.
Blog of Guillaume Gomez (Rust GCC backend: Why and how)
We begin by writing a few helper functions that will invariably prove useful to us later. We will be dealing with a lot of rectangular regions on the screen, so it makes sense to start by defining a rectangle structure and write some code to manipulate it.
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
Introduction Over the last decade, when working on databases with UUID Version 41 as the primary key data type, these databases have usually had bad performance and excessive IO. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4122#section-4.4 ↩
Building a Tamagotchi-style language learning iOS app with SwiftUI character animation - on drill design, motivation loops, and where Duolingo gets it wrong.
In May of 2023 an internal refactoring PR from the Svelte repo made it to the front page of the Hacker News forums. The (superficially) controversial PR seem...
One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers"…
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
An informal introduction to formality in Lean 4
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator…
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman's talk on the EmacsConf , it was titled "What I'd like to see in Emacs". One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was "memorable names", "I think every …
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
