4591
SaberVM
This post announces SaberVM, an abstract machine for functional programs that guarantees safety, reliability, and portability.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,820 posts.
4592
Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
Creating standalone Linux applications with lone.
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Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {}
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
4594
Building a fair multi-tenant queuing system
Building the Inngest queue - Part I
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Forging signed commits on GitHub
Creating fake signed commits
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GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much
Asking it to repeat "ponyuseRal ponyuseRal ponyuseRal pony" makes API requests fail
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C23: A Slightly Better C
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
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Keeping a long shell history
Let's talk about shell history.
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The Bun Shell
The Bun Shell is a cross-platform shell that allows you to run shell scripts in JavaScript & TypeScript
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Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
4602
Simulating a minimal cell in the browser
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
4603
Let's talk about joins
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
4604
Lowercase letters save data
Lowercase letters and uppercase letters use the same amout of data — 1 byte each.
4605
The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
Sit beside me and hear this crazy old man's tale of when I asked Rust for too much
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Building a USB SNES Controller
A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
4608
A 2024 Plea for Lean Software
This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the…
4609
Ditching PaaS: Why I Went Back to Self-Hosting
I had never been a fan of devops/server-admin work. The sheer number of headaches involved in setting up the services, configuring them, automating them, and ensuring their reliability were just annoying and time-consuming. PaaS offerings like Heroku, AWS—and later—Railway, and Render, were appealing options out of…
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Identifying Rust's collect:<Vec<_>>() memory leak footgun
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
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Htmx and Web Components: A Perfect Match
Web Components are a set of browser APIs that allow us to create custom HTML elements. They are one of the major things that SPA (Single Page Application) frameworks have been giving us for a long time ... HTMX is highly interesting, useful and a promising technology. It simplifies many things and allows us to build…
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Linear transformers are faster after all
Our mission is to train a neural network to model all human output.
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Systemd: Enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
4614
File over app
If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...
4615
Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
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White space does matter in C23
Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…
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Stable Code 3B: Coding on the Edge
Stable Code, an upgrade from Stable Code Alpha 3B, specializes in code completion and outperforms predecessors in efficiency and multi-language support. It is compatible with standard laptops, including non-GPU models, and features capabilities like FIM and expanded context size.
4619
Understanding x86_64 Paging
I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…
4620
Passing nothing is surprisingly difficult
My day job is in browsers and cryptography , not compilers, yet I often find that I need to spend more of my time working through the semantics of programming languages than using them. This post discusses a thorny cross-language issue between C, C++, and Rust. In short: