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LLMs can't self-correct in reasoning tasks, DeepMind study finds
A study by Google's DeepMind and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that self-correction in large language models (LLMs) isn't universally effective.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Avoid exception throwing in performance-sensitive code
There are various ways in software to handle error conditions. In C or Go, one returns error code. Other programming languages like C++ or Java prefer to throw exceptions. One benefit of using exceptions is that it keeps your code mostly clean since the error-handling code is often separate. It is debatable whether…
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Four Years of Jai (2024)
I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and Delphi, through Java…
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Scala projects are difficult to maintain
Scala is a powerful programming language that can make certain small teams hyper-productive.
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Why I’m Frustrated with Go
A brief example demonstrating my current frustrations with the Go programming language.
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Low-level is easy
My previous entry has the amazingly interesting title "Blogging is hard". Gee, what a wuss, says the occasional passer-by. Gotta fix my image, fast. Think, think, think! OK, here's what I'm going to tell you: low-level programming is easy. Compared to higher-level programming, that is. I'm serious.
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Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
Bear with me, because some of these "lies" are going to feel obvious, or like unimportant trivia. In all honesty, that's not that far from the truth. However, I hope you'll let me try to build a detailed and fun illustration showing how something as mundane as email can break our expectations in surprising ways.
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Common shell script mistakes (2008)
Portability and Robustness issues commonly found in shell scripts
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LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
" A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."
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A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)
I’ve been looking for a decent TSDB for years now. Took a shot at writing one in Lush using HDF5 (as others have done), but the experiments I did raised more questions than I got answers. I&#…
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What the Hell Is a Deno?
This weeks hottest new JS runtime.
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Lisp, Smalltalk, and the power of symmetry (2014)
Like many hackers, my first real programming language love was Lisp. Paul Graham, who inspired my own explorations of the language, is a particular advocate and has written quite a bit about Lisp a…
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Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code (2006)
Ten rules for writing safety critical code, to facilitate analysis and increase software reliability
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Initialization in C++ is Seriously Bonkers
I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…
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Don’t mock what you don’t own
A common issue when writing tests for real-world software is how to deal with third-party dependencies. Let’s examine an old, but counter-intuitive principle.
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Own Constant Folder in C/C++
I was talking with someone today that really really wanted the sqrtps to be used in some code they were writing. And because of a quirk with clang (still there as of clang 18.1.0), if you happened to use -ffast-math clang would butcher the use of the intrinsic. So for the code: __m128 test(const __m128 vec) { return…
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Flow-Based Programming, a way for AI and humans to develop together
I think by now everybody reading this will have seen how the new generation of Large Language Models like ChatGPT are able to produce somewhat useful code. Like any advance in software development—from IDEs to high-level languages—this has generated some discussion on the future employment prospects in our field.
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How Automattic develops software for over 75M websites
Leif Singer, an engineer at Automattic, tells us about interviewing for a remote job at Automattic.
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Swift Tooling: Windows Edition
Productivity on every platform - a deep dive on the ways we're writing Swift code on Windows, and improving the developer experience along the way.
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The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
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Python's sad, unimaginative Enum
Welcome to my blog, which was once a mailing list of the same name and is still generated by mail. Please reply via the "comment" links.
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When zero cost abstractions aren't zero cost
Rust is built around the concept of “zero cost abstraction”. The idea is that you can write human-friendly high level code and the compiler will give you for free performance at least as good as any optimized low level code you could have written yourself. With zero cost abstraction, you no longer have to trade off…
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Why curl defaults to stdout
(Recap: I founded the curl project, I am still the lead developer and maintainer) When asking curl to get a URL it'll send the output to stdout by default. You can of course easily change this behavior with options or just using your shell's redirect feature, but without any option it'll spew it out to … Continue…
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Multiple assignment and tuple unpacking improve Python code readability (2018)
Whether I’m teaching new Pythonistas or long-time Python programmers, I frequently find that Python programmers underutilize multiple assignment....
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What ID3v2 could have been
Speculations and specifications. If you were a Winamp user back in the day, or curate an MP3 collection currently, you might recognize the humble ID3 tag. It is what the metadata in the MP3 file is made up of. First it was pretty limited in the version later dubbed ID3v1. Like any good 2.0 they added a ton more…
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I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
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