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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…
Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…
With the rise of LLM systems (or “AI” as they are annoying called), the term “vibe coding” is all the rage recently. So I wondered, how does vibe coding work with BASIC?
Most of what I have written features in the category of notes-to-self. Mostly on how to do A or B.
You’ll learn why AWK doesn’t have a GC and understand some peculiarities in its syntax
A while ago, I was part of a team developing embedded software. The software was deeply rooted in state machines - dozens of them—spread across multiple functions. While this architecture is common in embedded development, especially for systems without an operating system, I started to question: Is this really the…
I'm the kind of person who thinks about the design and implementation of hash tables. One design which I find particularly cute, and I think deserves a bit more publicity, is Robin Hood open-addressing with linear probing and power-of-two table size. If you're not familiar with hash table terminology, that might look…
Collaboratively editing strings of text is a common desire in peer-to-peer applications. For example, a note-taking app might represent each document as a single collaboratively-edited string of text.
I used to call myself a Rust hater, but really I was doing it just to compensate for the perceivable fanboyism e.g. Rust tops on stackoverflow surveys as most-loved language. There are many reasons to hate C++, and I hate C++ too. Lots of people were waiting for a better programming language, but got Rust instead.
A blog, mostly about programming
April 30, 2024. I decided to dedicate a week to migrate our main project at work (a multiplayer mobile game server in production for over 4 years) from Scala...
An interesting twist in my recent usage of SQLite was the fact that I noticed my research scripts and the database intertwine more. SQLite is unique in that it really lives in-process, unlike standalone database servers. There is a feature to that which does not get used very frequently, but can be indispensable in…
In this post, I will walk through how I learned to implement Flash Attention for 5090 in CUDA C++. The main objective is to learn writing attention in CUDA C++, since many features are not available in Triton, such as MXFP8 / NVFP4 MMA for sm120. I also feel this is a natural next step after learning about matmul…
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...
ymichael's personal site
How to Use Python in C
When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your music, and need all the skills that come along with it.
Civil Engineer and Software Developer
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
What is new in Emacs 30.1? I go through every change in the NEWS file and talk about the most interesting and useful changes.
I brag about my newest obsession.
What if I told you you can get a full Linux computer with WiFi and a GPU in a small, pocket form factor for about $30 USD on AliExpress ? You might say “but what about the new tariffs?” and I’d say “oof, oh right, okay who knows, but it’s probably still pretty cheap!” (Edit: looks like you can get one for about $40…
Using git `rebase --onto` workflow to work with stacked diffs
We are in the midst of a Ruby drama for the ages. I'm sure a bunch of people figured we were all too old for this shit, but apparently we are not. This debate…
The Context I have been recently roaming. Doing some Zig, doing some Go, some Janet. Some C integration. Should have focused on my project but life threw more at me than I could handle, so I sought… happy distractions. My experience with those technologies taught me new tricks and one day, when I needed some more…
My preferred deployment stack for Python-built static sites.
