Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.
Previously on my quest for fast rendering of 2D vector graphics on GPU, I have posted a piet-gpu update and a deeper exploration into a sort-middle architecture. These intermediate results showed promise, but fell short of my vision for truly high performance 2D GPU rendering.
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
(This essay is a companion piece to Gitlet, my implementation of Git in JavaScript.)
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
In October 2021, Ian, a fellow frontend developer at GDS posted a message in our support channel for the GOV.UK Design System on Slack:
How I used Advent of Code to learn about the programming language Rust.
Building on the earlier article on automatically transforming Git URLs, I’m back with another article on a (potentially powerful) feature of Git—the ability to conditionally include Git configuration files. This means you can configure Git to be configured (and behave) differently based on certain conditions, simply…
This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So…
A friendly introduction to assembly for high-level programmers — Hello
A visual, interactive guide to what bloom filters are, when you would use them, and how they work.
After a while, I decided a write a short blog post about Linux binary reversing CTFs in general. How to approach a binary and solving for beginners. I personally am not a fan of Linux reverse engin…
Pipelines - a guided tour of the new IO API in .NET, part 1 (part 2 here) About two years ago I blogged about an upcoming experimental IO ...
A way to talk about programming languages, and a plea to Think Different™
I'm a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things.
Macros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect
Extensible programs like Obsidian have achieved a Holy Grail of software architecture, after decades of failed attempts.
Did you hear the news? Firefox development is moving from Mercurial to Git . While the decision is far from being mine, and I was barely involved in the small incremental changes that ultimately led to this decision, I feel I have to take at least some responsibility. And if you are one of those who would rather use…
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.
Andrew Vos's personal site
Building agents with LLM (large language model) as its core controller is a cool concept. Several proof-of-concepts demos, such as AutoGPT, GPT-Engineer and BabyAGI, serve as inspiring examples. The potentiality of LLM extends beyond generating well-written copies, stories, essays and programs; it can be framed as a…
In my view, wget is not a curl competitor. It is a companion tool that has a feature overlap with curl. Use the tool that does the job. Getting the job done is the key. If that means using wget instead of curl, then that is good and I don't mind. Why would I? To … Continue reading The curl-wget Venn diagram →
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Lotus is a complete web framework for Ruby with a strong emphasis on object oriented design and testability. If you use it, you employ less DSLs and more objects, zero monkey-patching, separation of concerns between MVC layers. Each library is designed to be small, fast and testable.
A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view!
How do you condense a 30 minute talk in 5 minutes? Should you even try? These are the questions I struggled with when someone nudged me to register for the lightning talks. My talk was 30 minute long because I was to jump in if a last-minute incident would prevent someone to get on stage. Call me the backup speaker…
This is an introduction to data structure flattening, a special case of arena allocation that is a good fit for programming language implementations. We build a simple interpreter twice, the normal way and the flat way, and show that some fairly mechanical code changes can give you a 2.4× speedup.
Josef “Jeff” Sipek's Blahg
A syntactic parser describes a sentence’s grammatical structure, to help another application reason about it. Natural languages introduce many unexpected ambiguities, which our world-knowledg…
