The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,820 posts.
I was fed up with the poor opportunities for abstraction in configuration formats. The many configuration languages that exist already were not invented here, so I wrote my own, at first just for fun. But then it became useful.
A progress update on where my Rye Project is today.
Today we're running Apache NuttX RTOS inside a Web Browser. What if we could compile and test NuttX Apps in the Web Browser? Let's explore with TCC 64-bit RISC-V Compiler, compiled to WebAssembly with Zig Compiler.
In the early-to-mid 2010s, there was a renaissance in languages exploring new ways of doing concurrency. In the midst of this renaissance, one abstraction for achieving concurrent operations that was developed was the “future” or “promise” abstraction, which represented a unit of work that will maybe eventually…
A deep dive into the world of vector networks, and the engineering challenges involved in their implementation.
This post intends to provide a brief overview of the algorithm described in Luc Maranget’s “ Compiling Pattern Matching to Good Decision Trees ”.
My learnings from publishing my first ever Dockerfile for ugit (a shell script based tool to undo git command) and writing the most optimized dockerfile for it.
I saw a Mastodon post that made me laugh this morning. It seemed sort of crazy that the html element wouldn’t have 100% support on CanIUse.com. Heck, I’ve been using it since 1994 and it worked just fine back then! This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Jujutsu (`jj`) is a new version control system from a software developer at Google. I have been using it full time for 6 months. Here’s why you should switch, too.
How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it!
History of Perl releases since version 5.6, each with a summary of added or changed features.
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…
The Vulkan Working Group at Khronos has developed a set of video format decode and encode extensions, collectively referred to as Vulkan Video. Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.277, the Working Group is proud to announce the new Decode AV1 video extension. Similar to the Vulkan project in its goals, AV1 is a…
The web is amazing.
The boolean satisfiability problem (“SAT” for short) is arguably the most famous NP-complete problem in theoretical computer science. According to Wikipedia, it is “the problem of determining if there exists an interpretation that satisfies a given Boolean formula ”; or, in simpler terms, if there is at least one…
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
Overture to our small Lisp to x86-64 compiler
We’re gonna need a bigger printer.
We recently released a new differential testing tool, called DIFFER, for finding bugs and soundness violations in transformed programs. DIFFER combines elements from differential, regression, and fuzz testing to help users find bugs in programs that have been altered by software rewriting, debloating, and hardening…
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
Follow along on a google colab: https://colab.research.google.com/github/philzook58/philzook58.github.io/blob/master/pynb/cbmc_tut.ipynb
Thanks to some coworkers and David Wilson’s Emacs from Scratch playlist, I’ve been getting back into Emacs. The community is more vibrant than the last time I looked, and LSP brings modern completion and inline type checking.
Write-only blogging
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
*This post has been significantly updated since it was originally written. The most recent update was in September 2026; a …
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
Learn how to add type safety to object IDs in a TypeScript codebase using template literal types.
