Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
When we first set up the llm such that it could play text adventures , we noted that none of the models we tried to use with it were any good at it. We dreamed of a way to compare them, but all I could think of was setting a goal far into the game and seeing how long it takes them to get there. I just realised there’s…
Some notes on storing data in pointers and the impact of >48-bit virtual addresses
I've released my new iOS app, Vignette.
I am a fond Clojure user, and love to use it for both server-side projects and small command-line tools. I love its expressivity and concision, and I like th...
Update post for the State of the Haskell Ecosystem
A sufficient understanding of computers is impossible without learning how compilers and their parts work. It is like stepping into the computer's mind and seeing how it feels from the inside. Compil...
Posts and writings by Nical
A signals-and-noise course left me writing Monte Carlo math on paper and wishing the notation itself would run. Nine years later, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting, NoiseLang became a real Monte Carlo language that runs the same fused kernel on the GPU, on every CPU core, and on WebAssembly.
I recently started exploring link-time optimisation (LTO), which I used to think was just a single boolean choice in the compilation and linking workflow, and perhaps it was like that a while ago… I’ve learned that these days, there are many different dimensions of LTO across compilers and linkers today and more…
I have built up a pretty good workflow in the terminal. The main thing that I was missing until now was an easy way to drag and drop the files that I am looking at in a terminal to other apps.
TL;DR: CPS-conversion and defunctionalization can help you to come up with a constant-stack algorithm.
Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”. In most languages, modifications to your program are applied by recompiling it and restarting it. In contrast, Common Lisp lets…
How I make it work (or not)
Introduction The case for open addressing SIMD-accelerated lookup boost::unordered_flat_map data structure Rehashing Hash post-mixing Sta...
Both GCC and Clang support the -fsanitize=undefined flag which instruments the generated code to detect places where the program wanders into parts of the C language specification which are either undefined or implementation defined. Many of these are also common programming errors. It would be great if there were…
A deep dive into evolutionary algorithms through the lens of low-poly image generation. This exploration covers genetic algorithm theory, custom Ruby implementation using the Petri Dish framework, and detailed analysis of genetic operators including roulette wheel selection, random midpoint crossover, and nudge…
I wrote a couple of years ago about the troubles I had finding a good libc for embedded systems , and for the last year or so I've been using something I called 'newlib-nano', which was newlib with the stdio from avrlibc bolted on. That library has worked pretty well, and required very little work to ship.
A few years ago I've written in some detail about the Y combinator, including implementations in Clojure and Python.
