121
Things Zig comptime won't do
Es el disco de Odín. Tiene un solo lado. En la tierra no hay otra cosa que tenga un solo lado.
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
122
A bug that taught me more about PyTorch than years of using it
a loss plateau that looked like my mistake turned out to be a PyTorch bug. tracking it down meant peeling back every layer of abstraction, from optimizer internals to GPU kernels.
123
Prompt engineering playbook for programmers
Turn AI coding assistants into more reliable development partners
124
To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head
This is a brief write-up of a trick I learned that helps me write code faster and more accurately. I say "trick", but it's really something I started to do without noticing as I moved further into my career. When you're working on something difficult, sketch a
125
Writing that changed how I think about programming languages
Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.
126
War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
127
There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
128
BERT is just a single text diffusion step
A while back, Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini Diffusion, an experimental language model that generates text using diffusion. Unlike traditional GPT-style models …
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Markov chains are the original language models
Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.
130
Examples are the best documentation
Examples are the best documentation | exotext
131
Blurry rendering of games on Mac
ProblemSolutionAffected GamesWhat Apple could do Problem I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023. If you game …
132
Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with
An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.
133
Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
What do each of these languages value most?
134
Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
135
Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s
A breakdown of Claude's memory implementation, how it differs from ChatGPT, and what these opposite approaches reveal about each company's philosophy.
136
Uncertain<T>
GPS coordinates aren’t exact. Sensor readings have noise. User behavior is probabilistic. Yet we write code that pretends uncertainty doesn’t exist, forcing messy real-world data through clean Boolean logic.
137
Why F#?
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I…
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Left to Right Programming
Programs Should Be Valid as They Are Typed
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GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst
GitHub Actions has a package manager that ignores decades of supply chain security best practices: no lockfile, no integrity verification, no transitive pinning
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PyTorch Internals: Ezyang's Blog
This post is a long form essay version of a talk about PyTorch internals, that I gave at the PyTorch NYC meetup on May 14, 2019.
141
Tags to make HTML work like you expect
I was watching Alex Petros’ talk and he has a slide in there titled “Incantations that make HTML work correctly”. This got me thinking about the basic snippets…
142
The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need
When my son was born last April, I had ambitious learning plans for the upcoming 5w paternity leave. As you can imagine, with two kids, life quickly verified this plan 🙃. I did eventually start some projects. One of the goals (sounding rebellious in the current AI hype cycle) was to learn and use neovim for coding. As…
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Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
Learn how to clone PostgreSQL databases instantly using reflinks. Turn slow template copies into milliseconds with PostgreSQL 18's new file copy options.
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Zig builds are getting faster
Andrew Kelley famously (or infamously, depending on your views) said "the compiler is too damn slow, that's why we have bugs." 1
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A leap year check in three instructions
How to test for leap years (until year 102499) in the proleptic Gregorian calendar with just three 32-bit instructions, with detailed explanation of the bit-level tricks.
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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
Update 2024-01-12 : Ken Shirriff has an an excellent blog post on why “cargo cult” is a poor term of art.
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Everything I know about good API design
Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of time…
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Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates
In addition to the VGA donut , I submitted two other entries in the Tiny Tapeout 8 demo competition , where you submit a "tiny" ASIC design (room for about 4000 logic gates) that outputs 2-bit RGB to a VGA port and 1-bit audio to a speaker. One was a an old school C64/Amiga intro type of thing, and the other was a…
149
We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application
We just completed rewriting the Ghostty GTK application fully embracing the GObject type system from Zig and also verifying with Valgrind every step of the way. The result is a more feature rich, stable, and maintainable Ghostty on Linux and BSD.
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Agent design is still hard
My Agent abstractions keep breaking somewhere I don’t expect.