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How to build highly-debuggable C++ binaries
code { white-space : pre-wrap !important; } This article is tightly scoped to cover one topic with specific, actionable advice: How to configure...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
662
Reverse-engineering my speakers' API to get reasonable volume control
I got some fancy new speakers last week. They’re powered speakers and they have streaming service integrations built in, unlike the 35-year-old passive speakers I’m upgrading from. Overall they’re great! But they’re so loud that it’s difficult to make small volume adjustments within the range of safe volume levels for…
663
Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32
I teased at this a bit in my previous posts and finally have a setup I’m happy with, so I thought I’d do a more in-depth writeup.
664
My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018)
Finding the median in a list seems like a trivial problem, but doing so in linear time turns out to be tricky. In this post I’m going to walk through one of my favorite algorithms, the median-of-medians approach to find the median of a list in deterministic linear time. Although proving that this algorithm runs in…
665
Versioned finite-state machines with Postgres (2019)
Inspired by Felix Geisendorfer blog post I implemented a database FSM (Finite-State Machine) with Postgresql. I brought some improvements to Felix’s implementation but before reading the following I recommend you to read carefully the original post.
666
Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
667
Generating sudokus for fun and no profit
A guide on how to generate sudokus of any difficulty.
668
Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub
You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.
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Space-filling curves, constructively
In 1890 Giuseppe Peano discovered a square-filling curve , and a year later David Hilbert published his variation . In those days people did not waste readers’ attention with dribble – Peano explained it all on 3 pages, and Hilbert on just 2 pages, with a picture!
670
Mastering Ruby Code Navigation: Ruby LSP Enhancements in the First Half of 2024
In the first half of 2024, Ruby LSP has seen significant enhancements, particularly in the area of code navigation, thanks to the advancement of its indexer. In this post, we’ll dive into the major code navigation enhancements that have been made to Ruby LSP. We’ll also touch on some experimental features that are on…
671
The Origin of Emacs in 1976
On the Origin of Emacs in 1976 (Emacs blog articles)
672
Counting bytes faster than you'd think possible
“Summing ASCII Encoded Integers on Haswell at the Speed of memcpy” turned out more popular than I expected, which inspired me to take on another challenge on HighLoad: Counting uint8s . I’m currently only #13 on the leaderboard, ~7% behind #1, but I have already learned some interesting things. In this post I’ll…
673
Types as Interfaces
For the past few days, I have been toying with an idea for a board game. To test it out, I wanted to write a simple implementation of it. Here’s an example of a type we might need in a critical phase of the game.
674
Database Design for Google Calendar: A Tutorial
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com. Introduction In this database design tutorial (~9000 words) I’m going to show how to design the database tables for a real-world project of substantial complexity. We’ll design a clone of Google Calendar. We will model as much as possible of the functionality that is…
675
The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
676
Clojure macros continue to surprise me
Clojure macros have two modes: avoid them at all costs/do very basic stuff, or go absolutely crazy.
677
Data Fetching for Single-Page Apps
Five patterns to help Single Page Applications fetch data from remote sources
678
Pin
The Pin type (and the concept of pinning in general) is a foundational building block on which the rest of the the Rust async ecosystem stands. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the least accessible and most misunderstood elements of async Rust. This post is meant to explain what Pin achieves, how it came to be…
679
An interactive guide to x86-64 assembly – moving data
This is the second part of a series of interactive articles on the x86-64 architecture. This part will focus on the first assembly instructions, visualizing the way data moves in memory when they are executed.
680
Mining JIT traces for missing optimizations with Z3
In my last post I've described how to use Z3 to find simple local peephole optimization patterns for the integer operations in PyPy's JIT. An example is int_and(x, 0) -> 0. In this post I want to scal
681
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
682
Converting Codebases with LLMs
Leverage LLMs with context like code structure, libraries, and screenshots to streamline code conversion tasks and accelerate development.
683
Playing guitar tablatures in Rust
Introducing Ruxguitar, a guitar tablature player written in Rust
684
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.
685
Instrumenting Python GIL with eBPF
Learn how to measure the impact of Python GIL contention on application latency using eBPF, with real workload examples.
686
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.
688
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
690
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