Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,828 posts.
Blue Team Rust: What Is “Memory Safety”, Really?
A brief technical primer on Rust's key security feature, with embedded-specific context.
How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)
Let’s say you’re creating a CLI tool which has to display syntax highlighted source code. You begin by choosing some colors which look nice with your chosen terminal theme:
Icdiff: side-by-side command line diffs
Your terminal can display color, but most diff tools don't make good use of it. By highlighting changes, icdiff can show you the differences between similar files without getting in the way. This is especially helpful for identifying and understanding small changes within existing lines.
Agent memory as a file format
Memoryfields - a vastly simpler way to do agent memory
Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase
When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach
Seemingly impossible functional programs (2007)
Andrej has invited me to write about certain surprising functional programs. The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “ Cantor space ” of infinite sequences of binary digits. I have included references at the end. A weak form of exhaustive search amounts to checking whether…
Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft
Post by Dr. Matt Wood Today, AWS and Microsoft announced Gluon, a new open source deep learning interface which allows developers to more easily and quickly build machine learning models, without compromising performance. Gluon provides a clear, concise API for defining machine learning models using a collection of…
B-Trees Require Fewer Comparisons Than Balanced Binary Search Trees
A blog by and for database architects.
PyTorch 1.10
We are excited to announce the release of PyTorch 1.10. This release is composed of over 3,400 commits since 1.9, made by 426 contributors. We want to sincerely thank our...
How well do agents use test/verification techniques?
We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse , indicating that whatever defaults developers are using may not work very well. Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use…
Elixir Design Goals (2013)
Highlight of Elixir design goals.
Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64
A space efficient UTF-8 binary-to-text encoding
Take the pain out of Git conflict resolution: use diff3 (2017)
Hating git conflicts? Use git's built-in diff3 option to make sense out of it all!
Application-Level Logging Best Practices
Logs from the application level are the only way your application talks back to you. Having proper logs with commendable search capabilities is like having a torch in a dark room.
Emacs Bedrock 2.0
Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without…
A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
The terminal is the result of its history, from the telegram to our terminal emulators. What is the difference with a console? The shell?
Zulip 7.0: Threaded open-source team chat
We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 7.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed to help people collaborate to solve any challenge. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous …
Debugging C with Cosmopolitan Libc
Gautham's Blog
Building C Projects
C is a compiled language, and as such, C programs need to be converted to executables in order to use them. Typically, programmers do this with some sort of build system, rather than running the necessary commands manually, because the compilation process for a large project tends to be quite complex.
Some Notes About How I Write Haskell
I want to say a few words on how I write Haskell as of 2017. Before I go on, I want to make very clear: this is neither a style recommen...
From Stacks to Trees: A new aliasing model for Rust
Since last fall, Neven has been doing an internship to develop a new aliasing model for Rust: Tree Borrows. Hang on a second, I hear you say – doesn’t Rust already have an aliasing model? I...
SIMD within a register: How I doubled hash table lookup performance
It started with a simple thought: four bytes in a hash table bucket look just like an integer. Luckily, this one idea led to a deep dive into bit-twiddling and a 2x performance boost.
Getting the Most Out of Sqlite3 with Python
Simplex Sigillum Veri
Systems thinking as important as ever for new coders
I was at the Microsoft BUILD conference last week and spent some time with a ...