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A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)
Dr. John Ousterhout is a computer science luminary who has made significant contributions to the fie
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,819 posts.
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Converting Codebases with LLMs
Leverage LLMs with context like code structure, libraries, and screenshots to streamline code conversion tasks and accelerate development.
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Playing guitar tablatures in Rust
Introducing Ruxguitar, a guitar tablature player written in Rust
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Postgres vs. Pinecone
We respond to Pinecone's recent blog post comparing Postgres and Pinecone. We show that Postgres can outperform Pinecone in the same benchmarks Pinecone covered in their article.
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Instrumenting Python GIL with eBPF
Learn how to measure the impact of Python GIL contention on application latency using eBPF, with real workload examples.
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Ruby methods are colorless
👋🏼 This is part of series on concurrency, parallelism and asynchronous programming in Ruby. It’s a deep dive, so it’s divided into 12 main parts: Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 1 Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 2 Consistent, request-local state Ruby methods are colorless The…
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What's the point of std:monostate? You can't do anything with it
Not doing anything with it is exactly the point.
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Hash-based bisect debugging in compilers and runtimes
Does this sound familar? You make a change to a library to optimize its performance or clean up technical debt or fix a bug, only to get a bug report: some very large, incomprehensibly opaque test is now failing. Or you add a new compiler optimization with a similar result. Now you have a major debugging job in an…
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Premature Abstraction
Practical tips that allow you to build an evolving architecture
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Overcoming the limits of current LLMs
Large language models (LLM) have been all the rage for quite some time now. Looking beyond the hype though, they have severe limitations: hallucinations, lack o
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Closed form arc length parametrization is impossible for quadratic Bézier curves
Bézier curves are widely used for defining vector graphics. They are basically polynomial parametric curves, but given in the Bernstein basis, which enables us to define the curve using control points. The first and last control point define the start and endpoint of the curves, the intermediate control points kind of…
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A brief interview with Awk creator Dr. Brian Kernighan (2022)
Dr. Brian Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who contributed to the development of UNIX at B
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The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks, opens all kinds of doors to career opportunities, and allows you to enter those doors earlier in life (which in turn allows you to accomplish more over the course of your career).
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CSS Classes Considered Harmful
If you've used CSS, you know what a class name is. They're a very poor proxy for the web today. Let's stop using them.
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Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)
Today I noticed via a tweet by @mitsuhiko that Mermaid Gantt diagrams are great for displaying distributed trace information like what you’d get from JaegerU...
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Optimizing a bignum library for fun
Can I make math operations run 100x faster on really, really big numbers?
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Codestral Mamba
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
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NSCopyObject, the griefer that keeps on griefing
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy , but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated.
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Godotcaml for Godot 4.2
A new way to make games
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The Engineer’s Guide to Deep Learning: Understanding the Transformer Model
In the previous two golden ages (1950s-1960s and the 1980s), our expectations outpaced the capabilities of the technology at the time, leading to disappointment. In contrast, the AI technology of the current golden age, which began in the mid-2010s, has consistently exceeded our expectations.
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Automated Test-Case Reduction
In a previous post, I used a simple interpreter bug to demonstrate the research skill of manually reducing test cases. This time, I show off the excellent Shrinkray reducer to see how it can automate the same process. The tricky part when using automated test-case reducers is writing an interestingness test that…
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Quartz: A Deterministic Time Testing Library for Go
Quartz shares the high level design of a Clock interface that closely resembles the functions in the time standard library, and a "real" clock passes through to the standard library in production, while a mock clock gives precise control in testing.
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Visual programming should start in the debugger
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
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I'm not a fan of strlcpy(3)
strlcpy(3) is an OpenBSD function which is often hailed as a safer replacement for strcpy(3) and/or strncpy(3) . One of the obvious issues with strlcpy is that it's not safe if src isn't null-terminated. However, that's not the reason I don't like strlcpy. In fact despite knowing this, I used to think it was an okay…
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Individualized Spaced Repetition in Hierarchical Knowledge Structures
Spaced repetition is complicated in hierarchical bodies of knowledge, like mathematics, because repetitions on advanced topics should trickle down to update the repetition schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced (while being discounted appropriately since these repetitions are often too early to…
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The Birth of Standard Error (2013)
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
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Solving the Worst Problem in Programming Education: Windows
I've created a set of install scripts for Windows that helps people install many different programming languages using standard tools.