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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,551 posts.

Software Engineering
2022
1531

Neural network from scratch

In this edition of Napkin Math, we’ll invoke the spirit of the Napkin Math series to establish a mental model for how a neural network works by building one from scratch. In a future issue we will do napkin math on performance, as establishing the first-principle understanding is plenty of ground to cover for today!

1541

C Runtime Overhead (2015)

What do you do when libc is your bottleneck? If the total runtime of your process is under 10ms, most of this time (depending on your hardware) is spent waiting for the linker and C runtime to set things up. If you compare this to the Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know , it falls right above "disk seek" and…

1547

Assembly Nights

Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…

1548

Almost Always Unsigned

Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…

1550

How Dwarf Fortress is built

Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…