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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Implementing a GPT model from scratch in NumPy.
I recently stumbled upon this screenshot while researching social media on the train. Of course, it was followed by a cascade of spiteful comments, criticizing this fresh programmer’s attempt to solve a classical problem in computer science. The modulus operation.
A visual introduction to memory allocation.
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can …
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
Dissecting why everybody keeps talking about microservices.
Let’s fix these pesky Transformer outliers using Softmax One and QuietAttention.
Modern extension to classic 2003 article by Joel Spolsky
AI Use Disclaimer: I wrote this post and then GPT-4 fixed my grammer and spelling
CRDTs don't have to be all academic papers and math jargon. Learn what CRDTs are and how they work through interactive visualizations and code samples.
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
Westbrook spent 35 years in a codebase that allegedly powers some sort of medical software somewhere. During his tenure, he contributed hundreds of lines of code to his projects.
Today's adventure: DIY whole hog data exfiltration
After my last blog post about Hurl, someone asked me, and I quote: "... why?" The simple answer is "for the joke." But the longer answer is that useless software [1] is a fantastic way to explore and experience the joy of computing. Play is an important part of exploration and joy.
Chris James, London - Software Engineer
And it only took 21 hours. Linux 6.4 has a bug where it hangs on boot, but probably only 1 in 1000 boots (and rarer if using Intel hardware for some reason). It’s surprising to me that no one…
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
Xe Iaso's personal website.
Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.
The fundamental problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower
Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t…
Personal website of Phil Booth
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
