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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,820 posts.
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Why Vim uses hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
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An Awk Implementation in C99
A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language
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Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
Yesterday Andres Freund emailed oss-security@ informing the community of the discovery of a backdoor in xz/liblzma, which affected OpenSSH server (huge respect for noticing and investigating this). Andres' email is an amazing summary of the whole drama, so I'll skip that. While admittedly most juicy and interesting…
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Git as a debugging tool
Debugging with Git Grep, Git Blame, Git Log and Git Bisect
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DeWitt and Stonebraker's "MapReduce: A major step backwards" (2009)
In January 2008 David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker published an article criticising MapReduce. As far as I can find, the article is no lon...
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Linear Algebra of Types (2019)
It gives my brain a pleasant thrum to learn new mathematics which mimics the algebra I learned in middle school. Basically this means that the new system has operations with properties that match those of regular numbers as much as possible. Two pretty important operations are addition and multiplication with the…
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Garbage collection for systems programmers (2023)
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
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The rev.ng decompiler goes open source
In this blog post we announce the open sourcing of the rev.ng decompiler, the start of the UI closed beta, how to try rev.ng and much more!
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Dioxus 0.5: Web, Desktop, Mobile Apps in Rust
A fullstack crossplatform app framework for Rust. Supports Web, Desktop, SSR, Liveview, and Mobile.
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LLMs use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge
Researchers find large language models use a simple mechanism to retrieve stored knowledge when they respond to a user prompt. These mechanisms can be leveraged to see what the model knows about different subjects and possibly to correct false information it has stored.
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Linux Text Manipulation
learning a lot about sed, awk and other commands by making a spotify statusbar widget
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A step beyond Rust's pattern matching
Projects and articles by Chris Gioran
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Writing Gnome Apps with Swift
Swift is well-suited for creating user interfaces thanks to the clean syntax, static typing, and special features making code easier to write. Result builders, combined with Swift’s closure expression syntax, can significantly enhance code readability.
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Finding memory leaks in Postgres C code
I spent the last week looking for a memory leak in Postgres’s WAL Sender process. I spent a few days getting more acquainted with Valgrind and gcc/clang sanitizers, but ultimately got nowhere useful with them. Finally, I stumbled on the memleak program from the bcc tools collection which led me right to the source…
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Claude 3 beats GPT-4 on Aider's code editing benchmark
Claude 3 Opus outperforms all of OpenAI’s models on Aider’s code editing benchmark, making it the best available model for pair programming with AI.
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How (and why) to run SQLite in production
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
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Write OpenAPI with TypeSpec
Why TypeSpec is the best way to write OpenAPI
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Tech Debt: My Rust Library Is Now a CDO
Bringing the great successes of financial engineering to Rust.
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Building an email-to-calendar LLM
Talk is cheap, show me the code Introduction A common problem my friends and I have is receiving actionable emails whose priorities are medium level. They do require action of some sort ($ \geq lowest\ priority$), but the action is due in the near future ($\leq highest\ priority$). I tend to skim over these emails…
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Two open source projects with great architecture documentation
esbuild and Redis1 are two examples of codebases with exceptional documentation. Through their READMEs, changelogs, architecture documents, and code comments, both projects explain their design in such a way that someone new to the codebase can understand where things are, how things are done, and why they are done…
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Bump Allocation: Up or Down?
Back in 2019, Nick Fitzgerald published always bump downwards, an article making the case that for bump allocators, bumping “down” (towards lower addresses) is better than bumping up. The biggest reasons for this are bumping up requires 3 branches vs 2 for bumping down and rounding down requires fewer instructions…
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Backpressure explained – the resisted flow of data through software (2019)
Backpressure is something nearly every software engineer will have to deal with at some point, and for some it’s a frequent problem. But…
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Who killed the network switch? A Hubris Bug Story
A Hubris Bug Story