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Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
A riveting tale of how good data can lead to bad decisions.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,538 posts.
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Web application from scratch, part I
This is the first in a series of posts in which I'm going to go through the process of building a web application (and its web server) from scratch in Python. For the purposes of this series, I'm going to solely rely on the Python standard library and I'm going to ignore the WSGI standard.
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The Various Kinds of IO – Blocking, Non-Blocking, Multiplexed and Async
A blog where I write down my thoughts, ideas and notions, as an exercise to cement them in my memory and improve on their concepts.
1744
A decade-old Steam bug
Valve has shown to occasionally not act on community feedback and bug reports. A story about a decade old bug.
1745
Various LLM Smells
Looks like this ended up on the HN front-page: HN Thread Late last year I started writing a math blog and decided to use LLMs to polish/enhance my writin...
1746
The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks, opens all kinds of doors to career opportunities, and allows you to enter those doors earlier in life (which in turn allows you to accomplish more over the course of your career).
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Algorithmic Trading: A Practitioner’s Guide
I really enjoyed reading Algorithmic Trading: A Practitioner’s Guide by Jeffrey M. Bacidore. Before starting, I imagined it would cover various strategies for trading in the markets, along th…
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Mjolnir
As much as I loved the beautiful machine , the passive cooling and form factor of the DB4 chassis had limitations. The best GPU I could fit in (and cool down), a 1050 Ti, barely managed to run Diablo 2 Resurrected. Playing could become unpleasant at 30fps in busy levels!
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Writing a C Compiler, Part 1
This is the first post in a series on writing your own C compiler. Here are some reasons to write a compiler:
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Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)
Today I noticed via a tweet by @mitsuhiko that Mermaid Gantt diagrams are great for displaying distributed trace information like what you’d get from JaegerU...
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Cool but obscure X11 tools
Cool, but obscure X11 tools.
1755
Rewriting Rust
The Rust programming language feels like a first generation product. You know what I mean. Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way. They made an entire operating system around multitouch. A smart phone with no keyboard. And a working web browser. Within a few months, we
1756
The Value in Go’s Simplicity
After using Go for a couple years, I’ve really come to appreciate its simplicity. I started writing Go at work a couple months ago, and have found it really easy to iterate on – much more so than Python and Java.
1757
No Config for Old Men
Ask anyone who's really into cooking and they'll tell you how important it is to have a kitchen that's arranged just right. To someone who rarely cooks, a kitchen is probably just a place to store a few pots and a toaster, and the placement of such stuff doesn't matter much: canned soup and microwave dinners are…
1758
Making any integer with four 2s
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
1759
Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused
Before I started doing research, I saw SAT solvers as academically interesting but without practical uses ouside of other academic applications. I've since then changed my mind, and I want to change yours, because modern SAT solvers are neat, fast and almost criminally underused by the industry.
1760
Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
I'm pretty impressed by what I've seen with Apple's M1 Chip. It's really fast and powerful for essential everyday tasks, which include browsing the web, working with Intel-based apps, and using programming apps. Yes – the ecosystem is moving, and that may take time, but I think M1 is worth paying
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
1764
The Failed Promise of Web Components
Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers. Remember how exciting it was every time we got new shiny HTML elements that actually do stuff ? Remember how exciting it was to be able to do sliders, color pickers…
1765
Replacing Middle Management with APIs
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services…
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Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better
A few years ago, very early into my programming career, I came across a story: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left si…
1767
Weep for Graphics Programming
The mainstream real-time graphics APIs, OpenGL and Direct3D, make miserable standard bearers for the age of hardware heterogeneity. Their approach to heterogeneous programming leads to stringly typed interfaces, a huge volume of boilerplate, and impoverished GPU-specific programming languages.
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Weird Python Integers
Python integers are stranger than I thought and playing with them can have surprising consequences.
1769
Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
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Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched
A dive into the app I designed, built and never launched. Stocketa was a personal project developed to serve as a simple stock portfolio tracker for casual investors. The app was built using Swift and SwiftUl and offered a custom UI, comprehensive transaction tracking, and a variety of features.