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Demystifying Floating Point Precision
Floating point numbers have limited precision. If you are a game programmer, you have likely encountered bugs where things start breaking after too much time has elapsed, or after something has mov…
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Add a const here, delete a const there
Update, February 2019: Two years later the VC++ bug I reported here still exists, even in VS 2019 preview. However Chromium no longer builds with VC++ so I’m reverting the changes where I del…
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Working with Git Worktrees in Magit
I’ll admit that until fairly recently I had no idea git worktrees existed. They’ve been part of git for a decade1 and I never once needed them. Feature branches did the job just fine - create a branch, do the work, merge it, delete it, and start over. What finally introduced me to worktrees was, of all things, AI…
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"I think that djb redo will turn out to be the Git of build systems."
I think that djb redo will turn out to be the Git of build systems. What do I mean by that? Well, think about version control systems before the cryptographic-DAG systems, and especially Git, came along. Everyone (everyone you'd want to work with, at least) agreed that a version control system was…
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Corrupt App Store binaries crashing on launch
Update, July 6: This is now resolved . Go to the App Store and redownload any affected apps — they should show up in the Updates tab. Do not delete and reinstall: it’s no longer necessary and you may lose data in those apps.
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Random Solutions are Often Good Enough
Sometimes taking the easy way out isn’t nearly as bad as it might seem! posted Thursday February 13th, 2014 Tagged: Math
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The quadratic formula and low-precision arithmetic
The familiar quadratic formula can give the wrong answer in a program due to numerical precision issues. This post shows what can go wrong and how to fix it. Especially important in low-precision arithmetic.
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How Command Line Parameters Are Parsed (2016)
It's difficult to get the Windows Console to display Unicode characters, so here's a C++ WinForms program that will display the arguments in a TextBox.
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LLM Neuroanatomy II: Modern LLM Hacking and Hints of a Universal Language?
In Part 1, I described how duplicating a block of seven middle layers in Qwen2-72B — no weight changes, no training — produced the #1 model on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard. The method, which I called RYS (Repeat Your Self), was discovered using nothing but hard math probes and EQ-Bench on a pair of RTX 4090s.
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Backbone vs Ember
Ember and Backbone are both promising JavaScript frameworks but have completely different philosophies. In this post, I'll compare the two, both from a practical and philosophical perspective. I'll defer to real world experience with Backbone and SproutCore (Ember's predecessor), as well as basic experiments with…
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The Design and Use of QuickCheck
QuickCheck is the grandfather of property-based testing libraries. Despite being imitated in over thirty languages, the original implementation remains pre-eminent due to the type system and consistent logic of the Haskell language in which it is written.
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
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Smart Pointers in (GNU) C
I am a big fan of C, but some part of me always yearn to have just enough higher level constructs.
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Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory
You can go far without writing TLA+ syntax now, but you still need to understand temporal logic.
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Math library functions that seem unnecessary
Functions include in the standard C math library that seem unnecessary at first glance and why they are necessary.
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Mod_python - the long story
This story started back in 1996. I was in my early twenties, working as a programmer at a small company specializing in on-line reporting of certain pharmaceutical data. There was a web-based application (which was extremely cool considering how long ago this was), but unfortunately it was written in Visual Basic by a…
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SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads
A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.
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Not Explicit
Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…
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You could have invented Parser Combinators
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
8907
A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
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Data Structures in JavaScript
Freelance web developer, lover of JS and all new stuff #reactjs, #redux, #docker #machinelearning... Co-founder and CTO @AppBubbleBD, involved in @AllOverSequins, @recursecenter alumni
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DotNetAnywhere: An Alternative .NET Runtime
Recently I was listening to the excellent DotNetRocks podcast and they had Steven Sanderson (of Knockout.js fame) talking about ‘WebAssembly and Blazor’.
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