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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,819 posts.
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Should you ditch Spark for DuckDB or Polars?
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is…
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Preferring throwaway code over design docs
If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.
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Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens
We introduce the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT), a new byte-level LLM architecture that, for the first time, matches tokenization-based LLM performance at...
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A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
A while ago, someone on the fediverse mentioned "OS/2's virtualization features" to me. I don't remember who it was, sorry. I had the chance to take a look at this today.
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Garbage collected smart pointers in Rust via concurrent cycle collection
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
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My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)
The point of these scripts is not to ban all use of constructs like the passive voice. (When it comes to writing, there are exceptions to every "rule.")
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Phi-4: Microsoft's Newest Small Language Model Specializing in Complex Reasoning
Today we are introducing Phi-4, our 14B parameter state-of-the-art small language model (SLM) that excels at complex reasoning in areas such as math, in...
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Elixir/Erlang Hot Swapping Code (2016)
Hot code reloading with Elixir and Erlang
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CADing and 3D printing like a software engineer
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
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A ChatGPT clone, in 3000 bytes of C, backed by GPT-2 (2023)
This program is a dependency-free implementation of GPT-2, including byte-pair encoding and transformer inference, in ~3000 bytes of C. I then use this to create something like Chat GPT.
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Dioxus 0.6 – Crossplatform apps with Rust
A fullstack crossplatform app framework for Rust. Supports Web, Desktop, SSR, Liveview, and Mobile.
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Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer
About 10 years ago I wrote a post PostgreSQL for the Busy MySQL Developer, as part of switching from MySQL to Postgres for my personal and professional projects wherever I could.
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Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined
C2y makes memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) and other zero-length operations on null pointers well defined. This removes a source of bugs that may result in security issues.
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Running Durable Workflows in Postgres Using DBOS
Technical deep dive into the new DBOS integration for Supabase
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Devin is now generally available
The work Devin has been doing and how your team can start using Devin today.
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Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust
we forked SQLite with the libSQL project. What would it be like if we just rewrote it?
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Common misconceptions about compilers
A curated list of misconceptions about mainstream compilers.
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Storing Times for Human Events
I’ve worked on various event websites in the past, and one of the unintuitively difficult problems that inevitably comes up is the best way to store the time that an …
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The Need to Grind Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction
If you go directly to the most abstract ideas then you’re basically like a kid who reads a book of famous quotes about life and thinks they understand everything about life by way of those quotes.
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Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing
4NF presented in a straightforward way, with some investigation of history of teaching 4NF.
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Lies I was told about collab editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing
In early 2024, I began investigating collaborative editing systems for use in Moment ’s core text editor.
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Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008)
Over the past 6 years or so, I’ve failed each item on “The Turkey Test.” It’s very simple: will your code work properly on a person’s machine in or around th...
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Writing down (and searching through) every UUID
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
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Sensible SQLite Defaults
SQLite is cool now. DHH uses it, Laravel defaults to it. Here is a list of _sensible defaults_ when using sqlite.
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The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
A field guide and why we need to rethink our expectations
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I spent a year building an Android course for the elderly
This is my story about an adventure into online teaching, video course making, and choosing a hard-to-reach audience, who desperately needs help.
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7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025
7 databases to explore in 2025.