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Fedora 38 LLVM vs. Team Fortress 2
F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who's at fault? ...
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.
1232
Emacs and the mouse: A modest defense of the rodent
A modest defense of the rodent So, Emacs and the mouse. This is an unexpectedly contentious topic, with discussions that end, at best, with careless dismissal. More often they turn into arguments with folks talking past one another. The advantages of using the mouse for common actions in Emacs are immediate and…
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Braid is dead, long live Braid
On the day I chose to start writing this, I went to an afternoon showing of Oldboy at Alamo. There’s a quote that’s repeated at least three times:
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Emulating win32
How retrowin32 works, at a high level.
1236
Introduction to FPGAs
Introduction Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a form of programmable hardware that has become inexpensive and accessible recently. I recently purchased a Digilent Basys 3 FPGA development…
1237
Revisiting the Fast Inverse Square Root – Is It Still Useful?
In 2005, id Software released the source code for their 1999 game Quake III Arena under the GPL-2 license. In the file code/game/q_math.c , there is a function for calculating the reciprocal square root of a number which at first glance seems to use a very peculiar algorithm:
1238
Use Gröbner bases to solve polynomial equations
A self-contained introduction to Gröbner bases and solving polynomial systems
1239
Infinite Context LLMs: Going Beyond RAG with Extended Minds
In this blog we discuss how the transformer architecture naturally extends over external memories, and share empirical results which leverage this capability. These methods are innate (don't require fine tuning) and outperform popular retrieval augmented generation methods.
1240
SDL2 common mistakes and how to avoid them
SDL has grown on me over the past year. I didn’t understand its value until viewing it in the right lens: as a complete platform and runtime replacing the host’s runtime, possibly including libc. Ideally an SDL application links exclusively against SDL and otherwise not directly against host libraries, though in…
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Writing Python like Rust (2020)
Listen, I didn’t plan on making a whole ‘writing X like Y’ series. But here we are.
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Classes vs. structs in .NET: how not to teach about performance
It’s been a while since my last blog post, but I believe it’s better to post late than never, so here I am!
1243
Small joys of programming in Odin
Update (2023-07-21): I was being a bit overly brief with liberal use of ... to mean “unimportant” in the code examples. Ginger Bill (creator of Odin) noted it might be clearer to have more correct/explicit Odin and Zig code for the examples given people would be less familiar. Those has been updated For the past few…
1244
You could have invented futexes
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
1245
Learning Zig
Welcome to Learning Zig, an introduction to the Zig programming language. This guide aims to make you comfortable with Zig. It assumes prior programming experience, though not in any particular language.
1246
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.This resource is useful primarily to developer
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GameBox is a programmable, turn-based, WebAssembly game platform
Let's make some games
1248
In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
1249
FTX – The fraud was in the code
The jury got a taste of code review as they examined a falsified "insurance fund" and the infamous FTX → Alameda Research "backdoor".
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WasmGC – Run GC languages such as Kotlin, Java in Chrome browser
There are two types of programming languages: garbage-collected programming languages and programming languages that require manual memory management. With to WebAssembly Garbage Collection, garbage-collected languages can be ported to WebAssembly.
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Plain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test
Designing APIs is hard. Designing good APIs that future people will not instantly classify as "total crap" is even harder. There are typical...
1252
Parsing an Undocumented File Format
A year or two ago, I wrote a parser for an undocumented file format as part of a larger project. This was somewhat challenging and I wanted to share my approach because I thought it was a neat idea that worked well.
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Make your programs run faster by better using the data cache (2020)
We investigate how the data cache influences the performance of your program, talk about ways for you to write faster programs by better leveraging the data cache.
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A Cryptographic Near Miss
A recent issue in scalar multiplication makes for a good case study of how unsafe interfaces, undocumented assumptions, and time lead to vulnerabilities.
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Browsers barely care what HTTP status code your web pages are served with
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…
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Rust Is a Scalable Language
In my last post about Zig and Rust, I mentioned that Rust is a scalable language. Let me expand on this a bit.
1257
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
This post introduces the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric and explains how it works, how to measure it, and offers suggestions on how to improve it.
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Short, friendly base32 slugs from timestamps
~4 lines of Go to produce succinct, stable, URL-friendly slugs from timestamps.
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Directly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration
It's been just over three months since we announced the Guile on WebAssembly project (codenamed Hoot ). Since then we've brought on two fantastic hackers to develop the project and progress has been quick.
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Hypervisor from Scratch (2022)
We write about Windows Internals, Hypervisors, Linux, and Networks.