Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
3784

Why Rust strings seem hard

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes from people trying to get into Rust who get really hung up on strings (&str, String, and their relationship). Beyond Rust’s usual challenges around ownership, there can be an added layer of frustration because strings are so easy in the great majority of languages. You just…

3793

Buttery Smooth “10fps” (2020)

The GIF (/ɡɪf/ GHIF) file is unfortunately the most popular and widespread form of exchanging animated content across the internet. Oh crap here’s one now A Pokémon I 3D modeled and animated called Shuppet, in 50fps When I am making animations, with the intent of ultimately becoming a GIF file on the internet, I…

3800

Baba Is Eval

Baba is You is a sokoban puzzle game where the rules themselves have to be manipulated to win. (For the uninitiated, the store page should explain the idea best.) The level of abstraction required to solve most levels makes it a formidable reasoning benchmark, with many reasoning steps being completely orthogonal to…

3802

The Transformer Family

Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of…

3806

Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?

vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…