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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code
(Not an anti-AI post — Copilot is great, I use it all the time.)
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Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
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Turnstyle – An esoteric, graphical functional language
An esoteric, graphical functional language
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Async hazard: MMAP is blocking IO
Memory-mapping a file is convenient, but it's a hazard when used with async/await concurrent code: it means a "simple" memory index does blocking IO.
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Code review antipatterns
Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to teach the author a useful trick…
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Techniques for safe garbage collection in Rust
This will be the first in a series of posts describing different design decisions made writing two Rust crates:
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Mimalloc Cigarette: Losing one week of my life catching a memory leak (Rust)
How do you solve a memory heisenbug?
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How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
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Rye and Uv: August Is Harvest Season for Python Packaging
My thoughts on Rye and uv.
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I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
How I learned the old truth that when building a software product and selling it to people, "building" is just the beginning. And often, it's the easiest part.
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Random Thoughts about Unity
From the outside, Unity lately seems to have a problem or two. By “lately”, I mean during the last decade, and by “a problem or two”, I mean probably over nine thousand problems. Fun! But what are they, how serious they are, and what can be done about it?
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Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Dallas High Five, one of the tallest highway interchanges in the world. It gets its name from the fact that there are five different levels of roadways crossing each other in this one spot. In some ways, it’s kind of
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Making database systems usable
C. J. Date's Sigmod 1983 keynote, "Database Usability", was prescient. Usability is the most important thing to the customers. They care les...
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Software possession for personal use
A little rest area by the road to a better web.
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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown
Zarar Siddiqi: engineering leader and consultant in Toronto. Building products with care, and helping teams do the same with AI in the loop.
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Toasts are bad UX
The core problem is that toasts always show up far away from the user's attention.
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On Writing Well
Writing a technical document is surprisingly hard. That is not because of the skill to tell a story. It’s because writing forces a level of clarity that is easy to gloss over while thinking through a topic.
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Sourcegraph went dark
Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
Turning models into products runs into five challenges
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The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
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On finishing projects
Personal site of Alex Reichert
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LLMs know more than what they say
... and how that provides winning evals
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The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with…
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Tales from the Far Side
Sean Kleefeld's daily thoughts about comics and the comic industry.
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