1951
Emacs Lisp Elements
This book, written by Protesilaos Stavrou, also known as ‘Prot’, provides a big picture view of the Emacs Lisp programming language.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.
1952
I've decided to move on to Distill
I do not plan to write more of my deep learning articles on this site. Instead, I will be co-editor of Distill , a visual, interactive journal for machine learning research emphasizing human understanding. I believe this will allow me to better serve the community.
1953
Rust and Go
I’ve been spending a bit of my time playing around with new languages — in particular, Rust has captured my imagination. The bulk of the…
1954
Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres
There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis…
1955
A final proposal for Rust await syntax
This is an announcement regarding the resolution of the syntax for the await operator in Rust. This is one of the last major unresolved questions blocking the stabilization of the async/await feature, a feature which will enable many more people to write non-blocking network services in Rust. This post contains…
1956
X86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary
Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having context in regards to what is actually being run by the CPU.
1957
1958
Nobody's just reading your code
Most programmers agree that we don't read enough code. The interviews in Peter Seibel's book, “Coders at work” highlight a comical contradiction: almost all the programmers interviewed by Seibel recommend that others read code for fun, but none of them routinely do so themselves. Seibel even asked Hal Abelson (of SICP…
1959
LD_PRELOAD: The Hero We Need and Deserve
A summary of my undying love for LD_PRELOAD.
1960
Go Slices Are Fat Pointers
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
1961
Technical, cognitive, and intent debt
three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code
1962
Automatic supercuts on the command line with Videogrep
I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep , my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts. These updates were motivated in part by a 10 week class I recently developed and taught at the School for Poetic Computation called Scrapism (web-scraping-as-art). The class includes a section on…
1963
Videogrep: Automatic Supercuts with Python
Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator. The code is here on github .
1964
Will Linux phones stay around this time?
While working through the old posts in order to adjust the front matter (and sometimes more), I thought: Will this last? Or will this go south soon, like it did around with previous projects again? A recent reddit post reinforced this line of thought, so I decided to write down my thoughts on the issue.
1965
Things I Was Wrong About: Types
I have changed my mind about some topics big and small so far in my life. Today: the value of types for programming.
1966
Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)
How to run Claude Code with the `--dangerously-skip-permissions` flag in a safe way
1967
Switching from Pyenv to Uv
Premise The 0.4.0 release of uv does everything I currently do with pip, pyenv, pipx, pip-tools, and pipdeptree. Because of that, I'm in the process of switching to uv. This blog post covers switching
1968
Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
A practical about:config checklist to declutter Firefox right-click menus on macOS, disabling AI/chatbot prompts, link previews, OCR, visual search, and other low-value context menu items.
1969
I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
1970
1971
1972
I Broke Rust's Package Manager for Windows Users
Last weekend I was playing around with a way to represent null-terminated UTF8 strings in Rust. Rather than just toying with it forever, I decided ...
1973
1974
Git In Two Minutes (updated after 8 years)
A minimal guide to everyday Git for solo developers: initialize a repo, add files, commit changes, view history, and restore earlier versions.
1975
1976
How to write an effective software design document
Best practices for writing a design doc based on my experience working as a developer at Google and Microsoft.
1977
Bret Victor update
Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have continued -- basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to our small size.
1978
How Rust optimizes async/await
The issue to stabilize an initial version of async/await in Rust has left final comment period. The feature looks slated to stabilize in an upcoming release, most likely 1.39. This represents the culmination of an enormous amount of work by people all over the Rust community. But it’s also only the beginning of…
1979
I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
Hundreds of hours, many late nights, and a working Game Boy emulator in F# with sound, running on desktop and web.
1980
Writing an LLM from scratch, part 13 – attention heads are dumb
A pause to take stock: realising that attention heads are simpler than I thought explained why we do the calculations we do.