2011
MCP vs. API Explained
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that connects AI models to tools and data sources efficiently. This guide breaks down MCP’s architecture, benefits, and how it differs from traditional APIs
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
2012
Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP
As Donald Knuth has just published Volume 4, Fascicle 7 of The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), on constraint satisfaction, I would like to provide…
2013
The program is the database is the interface
That transfer to John Smith isn't covered by any of the tagging rules. So I select the date, switch to the editor window and paste the date into the date->tag definition:
2014
Long Read: Lessons from Building Semantic Search for GitHub and Why I Failed
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
2015
An epic treatise on error models for systems programming languages
Musings on the representation, propagation and handling of errors in existing programming languages, as well as thoughts on future systems. (15K+ words)
2016
Great software design looks underwhelming
Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward — building a CLI tool that hit an API and allowed the…
2017
Bel in Clojure (2022)
9 months ago, I took a gander at PG’s guide to Bel . If you haven’t read it, here’s the premise:
2018
Zig's dot star syntax (value.*)
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
2019
Succinct data structures
An overview of a class of data structures I didn't know about!
2020
Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
2021
Git without a forge
I’ve written quite a lot of free software in my life. Most of it was from scratch: projects I started myself. So I get to choose where to host them – or rather, I have to choose where to host them.
2022
Writing an LLM from scratch, part 8 – trainable self-attention
Moving on from a toy self-attention mechanism, it's time to find out how to build a real trainable one. Following Sebastian Raschka's book 'Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)'. Part 8/??
2023
Solving SICP
This report is written as a post-mortem of a project that has, perhaps, been the author’s most extensive personal project: creating a complete and comprehensive solution to one of the most fa…
2024
Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen
Minecraft generates unique worlds with Perlin noise. Covers the algorithm, octaves, and Fractal Brownian Motion - with a terrain implementation walkthrough.
2025
Should managers still code?
Ah, the eternal question, straight from the mailbag.
2026
Solving First Order Differential Equations with Julia
In this tutorial, we will learn about solving Differential Equations with Julia. Differential Equations are everywhere in Science and Engineering problems. And, being able to solve Differential Equations using computers is very convenient. We will use the DifferentialEquations.jl package for solving Differential…
2027
Apple's Software Quality Crisis
Tim, I think we are not cooking
2028
The Differences Between Deep Research, Deep Research, and Deep Research
Dive into the world of AI engineering with this exploration of Deep Research in report generation. Learn how LLM-as-a-judge systems, machine learning, and ev...
2029
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
2030
Towards a test suite for TOTP codes
Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own…
2031
Yoke: Infrastructure as code, but actually
Infrastructure as code, but actually
2032
Nebu: A Spreadsheet Editor for Varvara
By Devine Lu Linvega
2033
Xcode constantly phones home
Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…
2034
Abusing C to implement JSON parsing with struct methods
Json parsing in C using function pointers attached to a struct
2035
A Map of Python
PyPi, the Python Software Foundation's package repo, counts over half a million open source projects. Since I use many of these every day, it seemed appropriate to get to know this set of packages better, and show some appreciation. The index website provides nice search and filtering, which is good when looking for…
2036
Yes, Claude Code can decompile itself. Here's the source code
These LLMs are shockingly good at deobfuscation, transpilation and structure to structure conversions. I discovered this back around Christmas where I asked an LLM to make me an Haskell audio library by transpiling a rust implementation. An “oh fuck” moment in timeOver the Christmas break I’ve been critically looking
2037
The cost of Go's panic and recover
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
2038
Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting
A few years ago I blogged about custom tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting in emacs . I started out with highlighting certain keywords in...
2039
When eBPF pt_regs reads return garbage on the latest Linux kernels, blame Fred
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the starting point of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code. Update: It turns out that there’s a…
2040
Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server
Notes from a backend dev who builds and runs his own infra. Go, microservices, blockchain, self-hosting, homelab projects.