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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
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Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris
Training gaming agents is an addictive game. A game of sleepless nights, grinds, explorations, sweeps, and prayers. PufferLib allows anyone with a gaming computer to play the RL game, but getting from “pretty good” to “superhuman” requires tweaking every lever, repeatedly.
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The compiler is your best friend
The compiler is a powerful tool, yet many developers have a painful relationship with it. Can we do better?
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When square pixels aren't square
When you want to get the dimensions of a video file, you probably want the display aspect ratio. Using the dimensions of a stored frame may result in a stretched or squashed video.
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The rise of industrial software
> _**Industrial**_ > > _adj. (sense 3a)_ > > Of or relating to productive work, trade, or manufacture, esp.
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Project ideas to appreciate the art of programming
Curated list of project ideas for programmers who aren't sure what to build. We chose 73 projects that teach a lot and are fun to build.
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A Vulnerability in Libsodium
Libsodium is now 13 years old!
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No strcpy either
Some time ago I mentioned that we went through the curl source code and eventually got rid of all strncpy() calls. strncpy() is a weird function with a crappy API. It might not null terminate the destination and it pads the target buffer with zeroes. Quite frankly, most code bases are probably better off completely ……
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Go away Python
A blog post written by Lorentz Kinde. It's probably about something technical.
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Parsing Advances
I find myself writing yet another toy parser, as one does during a Christmas break. It roughly follows Resilient LL Parsing Tutorial. Not because I need resilience, but mostly because I find producing a syntax tree and a collection of diagnostics a more natural fit for the problem than bailing out on the first error.
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The future of software development is software developers
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…
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AI is forcing us to write good code
When Best Practices Are Best
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A production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
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Five Years of Tinygrad
The first commit to tinygrad was October 17, 2020. It’s been almost three years since we raised money. The company is 6 people now. The codebase is 18,935 lines not including tests.
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Static Allocation with Zig
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
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Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainf*ck code results in an infinite loop, akin amost to a DDoS attack:
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You can't design software you don't work on
Only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process. That’s because you cannot do good software design…
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Huge Binaries
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
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Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2512
With the holiday season reaching its apex, we have a few surprises for those of you that have been patiently waiting. The latest release of Dolphin is stuffed with treats. Our first present is presentation - frame presentation, that is. Two new options have arrived and will help users both…
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Unity's Mono problem: C# code runs slower than it should
Execution of C# code in Unity's Mono runtime is slow by today's standards, much slower than you might expect! Our game runs 2-3x faster on modern .NET compared to Unity's Mono, and in a few small benchmarks I measured speedups of up to 15x. I've spent some time investigating what's going on and in this article I will…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling
How I built MacThrottle, a menu bar app that tells me when my Mac is thermal throttling, and the journey to find the right macOS APIs.
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Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo
Based on the latest tests I've published, Django LiveView appears to be the fastest dynamic frontend (I'm sure more variables can be measured). OK…
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C++ says “We have try... finally at home”
The destructor serves as the "finally".
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Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML
A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.
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Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...
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Why is calling my asm function from Rust slower than calling it from C?
This is a follow-up to making the rav1d video decoder 1% faster, where we compared profiler snapshots of rav1d (the Rust implementation) and dav1d (the C …
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Pre-commit hooks are broken
use pre-push hooks instead
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Developing a Beautiful and Performant Block Editor in Qt C++ and QML
How I developed Daino Notes block editor from scratch.