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Coping with dumb LLMs using classic ML
Taking the output of many dumb LLM search relevance judges and feeding the output to a decision tree to improve precision
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Isolating complexity is the essence of successful abstractions
Complexity has to live somewhere; but it does not have to live everywhere.
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The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Tilde, My LLVM Alternative
I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…
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Guided by the beauty of our test suite
Last summer, I published Raven , an independent implementation of the Uxn CPU and Varavara ordinator . In short, this is a fictional computer designed for cross-platform portability: programs targetting it can be run on any platform that implements the specification.
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You probably don't need query builders
In a previous [0] post I’ve discussed why I ditched sea-query and why sql is almostalways the best way to not re-learn something new from the beginning...
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Context should go away for Go 2 (2017)
As usual, when a new blog post comes out on blog.golang.org, I’m all eager to read it as soon as possible. The most recent one, Contributors Summit, is a nice write-up on the issues that the Go contributors have been talking about. While reading it, I stumbled upon a sentence that made me write this post. Here is is…
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Moving on from React, a year later
A retrospective on making the switch from React to StimulusJS at Scholarly
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Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms
Dissecting various compression algorithms.
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I'll think twice before using GitHub Actions again
The blog post discusses dissatisfaction with GitHub Actions due to its limitations in managing complex workflows, especially in monorepo setups with certain features like pull request checks and workflow reusability. Several issues have been highlighted, along with alternatives for GitHub Actions.
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Two Hard Things (2009)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
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How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities
Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.
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All Lisp indentation schemes are ugly
Indentation styles are a hot topic in every language. So let's see how Lisps do indentation! Uuuuuuugh!
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The surprising struggle to get a Unix Epoch time from a UTC string in C or C++
So how hard could it be. As input we have something like Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. Trying to figure this out led me to discover many ‘surprise features’ and otherwise…
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Haskell: A Great Procedural Language
These sound like dismissals or absurdities from the outside, but once you learn what they really mean, they take on a new light. In this article, I want to explain the third. (See the appendix if you are curious about the first two.)
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Dissecting "Tiny Clouds" shadertoy (2017)
There is an amazing shadertoy called “Tiny Clouds” by stubbe (twitter: @Stubbesaurus) which flies you through nearly photorealistic clouds in only 10 lines of code / 280 characters (2 o…
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WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics
Wasm GC is a wonderful thing that is now available in all major web browsers since slowpoke Safari/WebKit finally shipped it in December. It provides a hierarchy of heap allocated reference types and a set of instructions to operate on them. Wasm GC enables managed memory languages to take advantage of the advanced…
2179
Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction
As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming language -- a powerful and peculiar one.
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Branchless UTF-8 Encoding
I know how to decode UTF-8 using bitmath and some LUTs (see https://github.com/skeeto/branchless-utf8 ), but if I want to to go from a codepoint to UTF-8, is there a way to do it without branches?
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Guitar chord karaoke with Vamp, Chordino, and FFmpeg (2022)
A proof-of-concept using Vamp, Chordino, ImageSharp and ffmpeg to add live guitar chord charts to karaoke videos
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How hard would it be to display the contents of an image file on the screen?
I want to view a picture of a funny cat I found on the web. How hard can it be?
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Test-driven development with an LLM for fun and profit
Welcome to the very first post in a new blog! Here I will discuss software development, SRE work, and other fun stuff. Sometimes an idea is just too good to pass up. I hope this blog will motivate me to turn sparks and little pieces into general knowledge in writing the words down. The other day I was discussing Tabby…
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Build a Database in Four Months with Rust and 647 Open-Source Dependencies
Applications can append events directly to ScopeDB and query committed data without a separate ETL pipeline.
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How rqlite is tested
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, and built on SQLite and Raft. With its origins dating back to 2014, its design has always prioritized reliability, and quality. The robustness of rqlite is also a testament to its disciplined testing strategy: after more than 10 years…
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Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C
UPDATED: 2025-02-15: Fixed some bugs in the examples and pointed out that you don't usually just want to panic on memory allocation failure.
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Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)
The entire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule. Most importantly, there are lots of "war…
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Uv's killer feature is making ad-hoc environments easy
uv run - install, activate, and run in one command…