The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.
The tools of linear algebra are extremely useful when working in Euclidean space (e.g. \mathbb{R}^3 ). Wouldn’t it be great if we could apply these tools to additional mathematical constructs, such as functions and sequences? Hilbert space allows us to do exactly this - apply linear algebra to functions.
Tangent space is often presented as a confusing block of shader math. This is a deep dive into what tangent vectors actually mean, how they emerge from UVs to bridge 2D and 3D space, and the geometry that makes normal mapping possible.
A year-long journey through polygon meshes, cubemaps, and smoothed-particle hydrodynamics in pursuit of a modern SimEarth
Productized scapegoating
Every field of human activity has its unique characteristics, and programming is no exception.
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
The personal website of James Belchamber.
Optimizing compilers like to keep track of each IR instruction’s effects. An instruction’s effects vary wildly from having no effects at all, to writing a specific variable, to completely unknown (writing all state).
UPDATE 2024-04-15: Windows Terminal 1.19 contains a fix that reduces latency by half! It’s now competitive with WSLtty on my machine. Details in the GitHub Issue.
How a bit of algorithm engineering and low-level details can alter what seems like a straightforward trade-off on a blackboard.
Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…
An in-depth guide to listening to Postgres database changes through the WAL. Covers logical replication, publications, replication slots, and an Elixir implementation.
When my son was born last April, I had ambitious learning plans for the upcoming 5w paternity leave. As you can imagine, with two kids, life quickly verified this plan 🙃. I did eventually start some projects. One of the goals (sounding rebellious in the current AI hype cycle) was to learn and use neovim for coding. As…
(From someone who has spent far too much time thinking about the designs of programming languages)
For the past five months I've been leading the efforts to rebuild Zed 's cloud infrastructure.
This is my Code BEAM Europe 2025 talk, converted to a blogpost.
Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…
OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini, which they describe as "a more compact and cost-efficient version of GPT-5-Codex". It’s currently only available via their Codex CLI tool …
Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…
I got a job!
One great question in office hours led me to delete a whole class.
These are my opinions and are ruminations on what might be happening as more and more developers use LLMs and Frameworks to build on the web. In October last year I wrote “will developers care …
The phrase "favor composition over inheritance" has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we're missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led…
How continuous learning shapes effective software development with LLMs
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.
Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. A different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk's syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.
