181
I changed my license
In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
182
There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A _business_ will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.
183
Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory
A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust's peculiarities, from a C++ developer's perspective.
184
.gitignore Everything by Default
An opposite view on .gitignore files.
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The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
The transition to the Rust version of the React Compiler for the 1,036-file React Router codebase resulted in a significant speed increase, improving build times from 14.3 seconds to 0.81 seconds. The new compiler addresses previous limitations and ensures consistency across the toolchain, making it easier to manage…
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Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way?
189
Simple Is Not Small
small programs hide coupling
190
The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh…
191
How to bring up the Linux Kernel on a new platform
A guide to bringing up the Linux Kernel and a userspace application on a new hardware (or in this case, a self-made emulator)
192
Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
193
Static Allocation, Constant Work
In reply to this email:
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Poisson Disk Sampling
Stripe Across is a grog. We hope you enjoy it.
195
The Two Abstractions of System Design: Hide or Reduce
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
196
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in …
197
Fine, I'll build my own text editor
The one where I build my own text editor (until I get bored).
198
Io_uring Without Readahead
Someone opened a PR to implement readahead in Turso. It was a throwaway implementation, but a good excuse to measure io_uring and understand more about it.
199
Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk
Read this Tcl/Tk hands-up/primer to find out how the open-source Command Tool Language toolkit can help you develop cross-plaform tools for Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android.
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Reverse Engineering Unknown File Formats with ImHex
An Introduction to File Formats and ImHex by Reverse Engineering FEZ's Save File Format
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Agent memory as a file format
Memoryfields - a vastly simpler way to do agent memory
202
Malleable software = solid bases and custom code
In 2019 I bet on the no-code revolution. That bet aged so-so. Here is the new one.
203
Bug Blindness
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work , but most people I talk to don't see anything like this . For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that…
204
Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
I never questioned why code should be highlighted until I tried to make my own theme.
205
Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)
The following presents a fast algorithm for volume computation of a simple, closed, triangulated 3D mesh. This assumption is a consequence of the divergence theorem. Further extensions may generalise to other meshes as well, although that is presently out of scope.
206
Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV
Successful contributions to open source projects are a kind of currency. GitHub in particular encourages this in a number of ways: by showing avatars of contributors on repository pages, by showing your contributions to your followers via the activity feed and by signalling contributions per day on the activity graph…
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Software engineering is about managing complexity
There is a misunderstanding about software engineering that AI is making increasingly visible: we tend to confuse writing code with building software.
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Emacs 31: An unofficial guide to Markdown-ts-mode
Rahul's Blog
209
The Harness Is the Thing
Models are commodifying. The harness - skills, extensions, a scriptable app - is where the work and the leverage now live.
210
PageRank explained
Picture this, the year is 1996. You find yourself frustrated with the incumbent search engines like AltaVista, which primarily does a content-based search (it'll give you an article on "Hotels for Chickens" if you search "Hotels" because the word matches). There's gotta be a better way, right? Well, in hindsight, of…