1171
The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs
Who is the Assistant? We investigate the character that most modern language models inhabit when interacting with users.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,421 posts.
1172
C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
1173
Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
1174
The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
1175
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.
1176
Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
1177
I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task
I've been testing a simple prompt with different model and harness combinations to work out which one produces best results. I do this in /goal mode.
1178
Stroustrup's Rule (2024)
Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax.
1179
Engineering for Bounded Cognition
The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
1180
Pandas Exercises for Data Analysis (Interactive)
101 interactive pandas exercises with solutions. Edit and run every code block directly in your browser — no installation needed.
1181
Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia
use WASD + Mouse or tap on the screen to walk around :) Amulet of St. Michael in Kyiv, Ukraine (reconstructed with GaussianSplatting.jl, ~6M Gaussians)
1182
Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga
After the ACE BASIC posts of the last months, this one is about a different project I have been working on for the last half year: CL-Amiga , or Clamiga for short. It is a Common Lisp implementation built for the Amiga family -- classic AmigaOS 3 on 68k and MorphOS as a fully native PPC build, AROS and AmigaOS 4 maybe…
1183
1184
Building voice agents with Nvidia open models
Build an ultra-low-latency voice agent with NVIDIA open models. Learn how Nemotron Speech ASR achieves sub-25ms transcription, how Nemotron 3 Nano LLM and Magpie TTS work together, and how to optimize architecture for real-time voice AI deployment.
1185
1186
Bipartite Matching Is in NC
Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Las…
1187
Excessive nil pointer checks in Go
Let’s talk about nil pointer checks in Go. You want to prevent panics in production, but that doesn’t start with a deferred recover. It starts with defensive programming. Check your inputs, check your bounds, and check pointers for nil before dereferencing them. I’ve started to see more nil checks in Go code. In the…
1188
The <Geolocation> HTML Element
Discover the new way to request user location data.
1189
Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents
Self-guided agents that think continuously
1190
Now is the best time to write code by hand
As more engineers use the irresistible LLMs their skills atrophy, practicing will make you special.
1191
AVX-512: First Impressions on Performance and Programmability
A simple, whitespace theme for academics. Based on [*folio](https://github.com/bogoli/-folio) design.
1192
Lisp moving Forth moving Lisp
This chapter is a culmination of many macro techniques we have looked at so far in this book. Using macro abstractions we have developed, we create an implementation of one of my favourite programming languages: forth . Although this implementation embodies most of the important ideas of forth, it is very different…
1193
Even faster asin() was staring right at me
I don't normally do follow-ups and never this quick. After posting that last article, it was fun to read the comments on Reddit and Hacker News as they rolled in. I even found other discussions . I couldn't help wonder, "Could I have made it even more performant?" . After heading home I decided to take another look.
1194
Gpiozero Flow
Back in 2015, I had the idea for gpiozero — a Python library for Raspberry Pi, making programming GPIO devices simpler by abstraction: instead of thinking about pin channels, voltages, pull-up resistors and rising or falling edges, we think about buttons being pressed and released, sensors...
1195
80386 Protection
I'm building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog and blogging the process. In the previous post , we looked at how the 386 reuses one barrel shifter for all shift and rotate instructions. This time we move from real mode to protected and talk about protection .
1196
Ante: A new way to blend borrow checking and reference counting
Ante has taken the first step towards something we all thought was impossible: blending reference counting and borrow checking without run-time crashes. 0
1197
Some Words on WigglyPaint
In early December 2023, I wrote a drawing program called WigglyPaint and published it on Itch.io.
1198
Parallel Parentheses Matching
The parallel parentheses matching problem can be parallelized in different manners depending on the use case and is a good example of how stacks map to parallel hardware.
1199
Towards Self-Driving Codebases
We're post-tokenmaxxing. What are we pre-? How do we get there?
1200
C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma
C++26 brings us a small but meaningful cleanup to the language: deprecating ellipsis parameters without a preceding comma. This change, proposed in P3176R1, aims to improve C compatibility, reduce confusion, and pave the way for future language features. The proposal’s name is a playful reference to the Oxford comma …