The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
While trying to build my Age Apple Secure Enclave plugin , a small Swift CLI app, on Alpine Linux , I realized that the Swift toolchain doesn’t run on Alpine Linux. The upcoming Swift 6 will support (cross-)compilation to a static (musl-based) Linux target, but I suspect an Alpine Linux version of Swift itself isn’t…
The last of Digital Research
A C program that writes "hello, world!" to the console using inline assembly instead of standard library functions, demonstrating direct system call invocation.
Laurent Le Brun's blog
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
The other day I was interviewing a developer for a position at Wallapop. The candidate was a little bit junior, but I enjoyed their technical assignment and the conversation was going great. One of the questions I had to ask was
Optimize your Django SQLite configuration for production.
How Zig's allocators can help manage memory and improve performance
I regularly complain about OpenTelemetry, so with an aim to be a less useless contributor, today I'm putting pen to paper. If you're an implementer, I ask you to read this and take away the personal bias you might have towards your work, and instead look objectively at the feedback being given.
You can come to McDonalds and order a salad, but you won't. Same with notebooks, you can write NASA-production-grade software in a notebook, but most likely you won't. Notebooks make you lazy, and encourage bad practices.
How a 10 year old design choice for Swift’s type checker still haunts us to this day
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
This morning, I came accross Cameron Sun’s Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe on HN . However, the comments were disappointing, with people proposing probabilistic models, linear programming, minimax algorithms, and heuristic evaluations to develop AI approaches for the game, none of which quite correct. In this post, I’ll…
The RP2040 is a microcontroller made by Raspberry Pi. Unlike their more widely known products, the RP2040 is meant to be embedded in consumer electronics. It's cheap and available in tens of thousands for immediate dispatch from your local Mouser.
Modern processors have instructions to process several bytes at once. Effectively all processors have the capability of processing 16 bytes at once. These instructions are called SIMD, for single instruction, multiple data. It was once an open question whether these instructions could be useful to accelerate common…
Le site où je raconte comment faire du logiciel de qualité2024193 points92 commentsProgramming Languages details
From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypothetical functional programming language called Gooby. In these discussions, often someone…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
Event-driven architecture is great, but it can cause a lot of headaches if it is used for the wrong purpose.
Using an odd floating point error to detect emulators
Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…
Here’s a fact: GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying. (There’s also an 85 tokens charge for a low-res ‘master thumbnail’ of each picture and higher…
