The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
OCaml's let … = … in … is very confusing. When nested, you can't tell how it's nested.
A Chess-AI is something every programmer should build at least once and [Sebastian Lague’s](https://www.youtube.com/@SebastianLague) [competition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iScy18pVR58) was the perfect opportunity for me to do so. Constrained to 1024 tokens I wanted to implement an evaluation function similar to…
An expose on Implicits and Local Coherence
You want it to just work. But it resists.
Recently, my team and I fixed an absolutely bizarre bug that only one person in the team could reproduce. And to make it even weirder, she was only able to reproduce the issue when using her work laptop at home; it worked fine with the same laptop in the office.
Musings about async await again and why I think virtual threads
A good programmer is someone who can write large programs that have a high probability of being correct.
Can we build a reactive notebook in a single HTML file? Yes (by standing on the shoulders of Observable)
I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…
Update Nov 30: I've added a version 2, which makes the benchmarks and design overview section in this article outdated. See the github repo for updated benchmarks.
Zarar Siddiqi: engineering leader and consultant in Toronto. Building products with care, and helping teams do the same with AI in the loop.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Yesterday John Graham-Cumming posted about “Steve Ballmer’s incorrect binary search interview question,” and in the Hacker News discussion, among the predictable “interview culture is flawed!!” complaints, there was some discussion of whether binary search was even the right way to solve Ballmer’s puzzle. Here’s a…
Freedom is nothing without constraints, and Go’s generics gives us a powerful way to build polymorphic types and functions constrained by type sets . Let’s geek out.
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely…
I was talking to one of my students earlier, and lent him a book to read over summer. It was only after he’d left that I realised that — for me at any rate — the book I’d given him is probably the most seminal work in the whole of computer science, and certainly the book that’s most influenced my career and research…
GDB is an old and ubiquitous debugger for Linux and BSD systems that has extensive language, processor, and binary format support. Its interface is a little cryptic, but learning GDB pays off.
Welcome to the Matrix. Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised communication. Matrix allows users on different servers to communicate with each other, similar to how people on different email servers can email each other.
There are two main aspects to compile times that matter to developers. Cold build times, when building from scratch and warm build times when you’ve already built and you’re rebuilding following an edit. This article focuses on warm build times, which for rapid iteration during development is what generally matters…
Building git for lawyers at Version Story (YC W21) — versionstory.com
When doing systems programming we often need to wait for something to happen. Common examples might be waiting for some data to come through a socket or waiting on a lock. We also often want to wait on any of several conditions to become true. A web server might be handling many sockets at once, waiting for any number…
Introduction My main background is a hedge fund professional, so I deal with finance data all the time and so far the Pandas library has been an indispensab...
Explores SQLite B-Tree index structure with visualizations, explaining on-disk and in-memory storage mechanisms
There’s a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba’s Qwen research team. On first impression it looks like …
Docker Compose solves real problems in getting applications deployed. It causes problems when deploying many applications. We can do better.
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
I’ve been working professionally for the better part of a decade on web apps and, in that time, I’ve had to learn how to use a lot of different systems and tools. During that education, I found that the official documentation typically proved to be the most helpful.
