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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.
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What No One Told You About Z-Index
The problem with z-index is that very few people understand how it really works. It’s not complicated, but it if you’ve never taken the time to read its specification, there are almost certainly crucial aspects that you’re completely unaware of.
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Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber
Many are aware that some YouTubers are unhappy with how YouTube operates. But are you aware that Android app developers go through similar struggles with Google Play? Let me try and explain everything that's wrong with Android in a single 20 minutes read.
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Optimizations can have unexpectedly large effects when combined with caches
This post is about a non-obvious interaction between performance optimizations and LRU/time limited caching.
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Chord progressions of 25,000 songs
Systems thinker who ended up in data. Mostly working out why organisations can't answer their own questions.
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Solving Factorio Quality
I play Factorio the normal way: by writing matrix math code to plan the factory.
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Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…
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Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
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How close can pure functional programming get to C?
In Why Lean is Faster Than Rust , the author shares an impressive result: a DEFLATE compression library written in Lean 4 , a functional programming language and proof assistant, outperforming an equivalent Rust package that crates.io says has been downloaded over a billion times. From the article:
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LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective
TL;DR: Giving LLMs the full output of tool calls is costly and slow. Output schemas will enable us to get structured data, so we can let the LLM orchestrate ...
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Any program can be a GitHub Actions shell
In GitHub Actions, you can use the shell keyword to specify the shell that runs a given run: block. This keyword is optional for workflows but mandatory for action definitions.
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Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
HN should be treated as an external comment section for the internet to the extent that it can’t substitute for the internet, much less for your own thinking. At its best, HN is a map to new questions and a window onto new angles. The landscape itself remains elsewhere.
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Refactoring GitHub's Design
Reducing an interface until only the absolutely necessary elements remain is one of the most satisfying tasks in design.
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Why is Idris 2 so much faster than Idris 1?
I've just released a new version of Idris 2 , which is a significant release in that it's the first one which is able to compile itself. Thus, it's the first one where we can really see how the performance of Idris 2 improves on the performance of Idris 1.
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Git Diagramming "The Weave"
We all know the current US President is one hell of an orator and often assures us that he has “the best words”:
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Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
Today i bring the working main camera! Building on the work nondescriptpointer did on the wide lens camera i have written the driver for the main camera and now its working alongside auto focus and color correction. The color correction still a work in progress, but you can…
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The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…
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Exponentially Better Rotations (2022)
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
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It’s Time for Some Queueing Theory
Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web s
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How Python asyncio works: recreating it from scratch
Learn how asyncio works by recreating it from scratch with Python generators and using the __await__ dunder method for the async/await keywords.
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A Zero-Math Introduction to Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
For many of us, Bayesian statistics is voodoo magic at best, or completely subjective nonsense at worst. Among the trademarks of the…