The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the…
Since I first started working on my website at age fourteen, the site has gone through many revisions, and hopefully changed for the better. This blog was originally dynamically served using a Python/Flask backend, having a custom login system and post “editor” (just an input box). One of the more strange things about…
Mistral Contrastin's thought bubble, blog, and personal revelations.
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
One person's entry-level contribution is another person's difficult bugfix or backport.
Title is literally true. This may not be the best place to learn about these concepts for the first time, because I'm going to focus on knocking down the misconceptions about them.
I’ve seen a lot of poorly implemented spinlocks floating around the internet.
Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…
DuckDB, a free and open source analytical data management system, can run SQL queries directly on Parquet files and automatically take advantage of the advanced features of the Parquet format.
I started a Twitter conversation last week about API endpoints that stream large amounts of data as an alternative to APIs that return 100 results at a time and require …
Modelling hierarchical/team/categorical/tag data with arbitrary depths.
Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS Announces AWS BugBust
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
At the least, AI-generated code is much more readable than the average human’s.
Some of my personal thoughts on how we design open source projects
The Elixir 1.12 version introduced some significant changes. The main one is the ability to create scripts and import dependencies via Mix.install. The interactive console can be more helpful in the software development, prototyping and debugging processes.
The conflict between subclassing and composition is as old as object-oriented programming. The latest crop of languages like Go or Rust prove that you don’t need subclassing to successfully write code. But what’s a pragmatic approach to subclassing in Python, specifically?
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
I've worked with a number of clients on Elixir projects and I've onboarded myself, I've been onboarded and I've onboarded others. And compared to my experiences with PHP/Python/Javascript and my limited experience with C#/.Net I have experienced quite a difference.
Update for future readers: Are you looking for a way to undo something with Git? The git undo command won’t help with your current issue (it needs to be inst...
AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, C and C++ — helping developers build safe and secure software that matters.
Some reflections on trusting trust, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.
This week twenty-five years ago, Quake broke new ground in game engine realism. It was one of the first commercial games to have fully texture mapped 3D scenes rendered in real-time, with pre-computed lightmaps adding an extra layer of atmosphere.
There are a number of things that people theoretically know how to do, but which aren’t possible because of how software gets made. Some of these are almost forgotten, but there are at least …
The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON …
