1771
The Alder Lake SHLX Anomaly
Apparently shlx is a “medium latency” (3 cycles) instruction on Alder Lake. My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
1772
The collapse of the econ PhD job market
What is an Economics PhD worth in 2025?
1773
When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
1774
I want a good parallel computer
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from…
1775
Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
1776
Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos
Color is the most disputed part of astrophotography: Every image looks different and the internet is full of arguments over what colors are correct or natural.
1777
The Xenon Death Flash: How a Camera Nearly Killed the Raspberry Pi 2
The bizarre story of how taking flash photos could instantly crash the Raspberry Pi 2, the community detective work that solved it, and why this strange bug revealed fundamental flaws in modern chip design.
1778
Write the damn code
You are a software engineer. Don't become a prompt refiner.
1779
A review of Nim 2: The good and bad with example code
I've been using Nim for about 1-2 years now, and I believe the language is undervalued. It's not perfect, of course, but it's pleasant to write and read. My personal website uses Nim .
1780
Emacs agent-shell (powered by ACP)
Not long ago, I introduced acp.el, an Emacs lisp implementation of ACP (Agent Client Protocol), the agent protocol developed between Zed and Google fo...
1781
How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
1782
How can I influence others without manipulating them?
Learn practical ways to influence others ethically using five respectful approaches that build trust, commitment and genuine buy-in.
1783
At the end you use `git bisect`
People rant about having to learn algorithmic questions for interviews. I get it — interview system is broken, but you ought to learn binary search at least.
1784
Clock synchronization is a nightmare
Time seems simple. But we engineers lose sleep over something as basic as keeping clocks in sync. Here’s why…
1785
Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics
The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.
1786
Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years?
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions…
1787
Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021)
This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.
1788
CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space
These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space…
1789
An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens
Since I reside in a Five Eyes country (Australia) and have publicly presented four cases I led on China’s APT41 attacking organisations in ASEAN , particularly concerning China’s cyber and political strategies, I was curious to explore what China publishes about Five Eyes operations. This led me down a rabbit hole of…
1790
How Compiler Explorer Works in 2025
How we handle 92 million compilations a year without everything catching fire
1791
<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
Dan explores the history of two (much-maligned) HTML tags of the yesterweb. With blinking marquees!
1792
AI slop, suspicion, and writing back
On developing an involuntary reflex for spotting AI slop
1793
Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair
Here’s to being a preserving student for life.
1794
The Differences Between Deep Research, Deep Research, and Deep Research
Dive into the world of AI engineering with this exploration of Deep Research in report generation. Learn how LLM-as-a-judge systems, machine learning, and ev...
1795
Using the most unhinged AVX-512 instruction to make fastest phrase search algo
Disclaimers before we start For those who don’t want to read/don’t care that much, here are the results. I hope after seeing them you are compelled to read. TL;DR: I wrote a super fast phrase search algorithm using AVX-512 and achieved wins up to 1600x the performance of Meilisearch. The source code can be found here…
1796
DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase
How I use DeepWiki to speed up real coding work
1797
If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1798
When did people favor composition over inheritance?
The phrase "favor composition over inheritance" has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we're missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led…
1799
FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be, and… I found I’m FP-pilled.
1800
Wolfram Compute Services
Wolfram releases the Wolfram Compute Services system--a fully programmable, streamlined way to scale up Wolfram Language computations. For large volumes of data, extensive iterations, large-scale parallelism and more.