1501
A kernel bug froze my machine: Debugging an async-profiler deadlock
How I investigated and worked around a kernel bug that caused async-profiler to freeze my machine whenever I tried to use a profiler.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,817 posts.
1502
Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
1503
Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
1504
Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
Introduction Over the last decade, when working on databases with UUID Version 41 as the primary key data type, these databases have usually had bad performance and excessive IO. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4122#section-4.4 ↩
1505
The Whole App is a Blob
Building a Tamagotchi-style language learning iOS app with SwiftUI character animation - on drill design, motivation loops, and where Duolingo gets it wrong.
1506
JSDoc is TypeScript
In May of 2023 an internal refactoring PR from the Svelte repo made it to the front page of the Hacker News forums. The (superficially) controversial PR seem...
1507
Stop crawling my HTML – use the API
One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers"…
1508
Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
1509
Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
1510
My Gift to the Rustdoc Team
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
1511
From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4
An informal introduction to formality in Lean 4
1512
Closures as Win32 Window Procedures
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator…
1513
Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith
Discover Twilio’s shift to a single powerful service! Learn cloud communication trends, customer success stories, and how to build scalable apps. Join now!
1514
I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
1515
In Defense of Matlab Code
MATLAB still shines for math-heavy work. Its whiteboard-style syntax makes code easy to read, review, and run on modern tools like RunMat and fast GPUs.
1516
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman's talk on the EmacsConf , it was titled "What I'd like to see in Emacs". One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was "memorable names", "I think every …
1517
From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work
Understanding how search engines transform text into tokens through character filtering, tokenization, stemming, and stopword removal.
1518
The Cost of a Closure in C
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
1519
1520
When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023)
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like "prefer composition to...
1521
Pg_ClickHouse: A Postgres extension for querying ClickHouse
Today, we’re pleased to release pg_clickhouse, an Apache 2-licensed PostgreSQL extension to transparently execute analytics queries on ClickHouse directly from PostgreSQL.
1522
COM Like a Bomb: Rust Outlook Add-in
One of legal tech's clichés is that "lawyers live in Word". This is demonstrably incorrect. I, for example, am a lawyer and in fact live in London, England…
1523
Common Lisp, ASDF, and Quicklisp: packaging explained
Common Lisp has good packaging tools, but they're different. Here we explain the what and how.
1524
Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"
There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995).
1525
Go Proposal: Secret Mode
Automatically erase memory to prevent secret leaks.
1526
Django: what’s new in 6.0
Django 6.0 was released today, starting another release cycle for the loved and long-lived Python web framework (now 20 years old!). It comes with a mosaic of new features, contributed to by many, some of which I am happy to have helped with. Below is my pick of highlights from the release notes.
1527
If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds.
1528
My favourite small hash table
I'm the kind of person who thinks about the design and implementation of hash tables. One design which I find particularly cute, and I think deserves a bit more publicity, is Robin Hood open-addressing with linear probing and power-of-two table size. If you're not familiar with hash table terminology, that might look…
1529
The highest quality codebase
Blog post
1530
Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.