Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,422 posts.
This was a very old draft I’ve had sitting around for years. The recent discussions of new query languages like Acadia spurred me to revisit, revise, and publish this. I think one of the biggest causes of NoSQL is that… Continue reading →
AI agents address the remaining concerns with having your documentation alongside your code in version control
While Claude Code and Codex have significantly accelerated the automation of software development, limitations in the context window of a…
c’mon, try doing a breakthrough
What would have happened if Emacs' default buffer had been a terminal emulator? Conceptually, from the outside, it would be perceived as a terminal…
One command-line tool to query them all, built with Rust and ADBC
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.
I’ve forgotten how to write code, or at least I think I have. Hard to be sure, I haven’t done it for a while. But then, I start to muse…
Comparing token efficiency across 19 popular programming languages using RosettaCode data - from Clojure to C, there's a 2.6x difference.
Slop, Alienation, Deskilling, and Team Fallout
People pick languages differently with LLMs.
My new book guides you through the start-to-finish build of a real world web application in Go — covering topics like how to structure your code, manage dependencies, create dynamic database-driven pages, and how to authenticate and authorize users securely .
A practical walk-through of a fixed-width uint128 implementation in modern C++.
My two-year-old son used a Brio wooden train set to explain constraint solving to his silly Dada.
SAFA details the full exploitation of CVE-2025-13032, turning a double-fetch vulnerability in Avast's kernel driver into a local privilege escalation to SYSTEM on Windows 11.
New with expressions, type-safe error checking, and faster everything.
“When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door”— Grateful Dead, “Uncle John’s Band”
Many people, including myself, have implemented garbage collection (GC)libraries for Rust. Manish Goregaokar wrote up a fantastic survey of thisspace a few y...
We get asked about AI a lot. Whether we’re going to add it to Yarn Spinner, whether we use it ourselves, what we think about it. Fair questions. Time to write it all down. Yarn Spinner doesn’t use the technology that’s currently being called AI. We don’t have generative AI features in the product, and we don’t use…
In Python, the dict data structure is the conventional key-value structure. E.g., you might store a list of names as keys and have their phone numbers as values. Valentin Ignatev wrote this amusing post on X: It is indeed widely believed that, in the strict sense, the dict data structure and its companion, the set ……
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eve...
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else…
A recap on the work done in NumPy and CPython to make multi-threaded NumPy workloads scale on the free-threaded build of CPython.
Word sizes, strange machines, and why <strong>int</strong> was never meant to mean 32 bits. C's flexible integer types were how the language achieved portability in a world of 12, 18, 36, and 60-bit computers.
