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Floating points between zero and one
floating-points-between-zero-and-one - Chad Nauseam Home
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
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Garbage collected smart pointers in Rust via concurrent cycle collection
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
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Data Fetching for Single-Page Apps
Five patterns to help Single Page Applications fetch data from remote sources
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Taming floating-point sums
Suppose you have an array of floating-point numbers, and wish to sum them. You might naively think you can simply add them, e.g. in Rust:
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Zero or Sign Extend
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…
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Identifying Software
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
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Fine, I'll Play With Skiplists
Follow me on Bluesky! A Log-Structured Merge tree, or LSM, is a popular data structure for storage engines. It’s what is used by RocksDB, which is sort of...
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QEMU AioContext removal and how it was done
This post is about the AioContext lock removal in QEMU 9.0 (planned for release in 2024), how we got here, and what it means for multi-threa...
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Differ: Tool for testing and validating transformed programs
We recently released a new differential testing tool, called DIFFER, for finding bugs and soundness violations in transformed programs. DIFFER combines elements from differential, regression, and fuzz testing to help users find bugs in programs that have been altered by software rewriting, debloating, and hardening…
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Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway
My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes [1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word" , and yet the dominant experience of using any software-based system—which is, you know, pretty much anything electronic—is trusting the manufacturer. Not only is there no meaningful way to determine what software…
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Overcoming the limits of current LLMs
Large language models (LLM) have been all the rage for quite some time now. Looking beyond the hype though, they have severe limitations: hallucinations, lack o
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Rust is rolling off the Volvo assembly line
In my job I get to speak to lots of people about Rust. Some are just starting out, some have barely ever heard of it, and then some people are running Rust silently in production at a very large company in a very serious product.
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A beginner's guide to constant-time cryptography (2017)
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced…
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Zig 0.12.0 Release Notes
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
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A tiny self-remaking C program
In my last post I floated the idea of writing a slow, edit-prone shell script instead as a self-rebuilding C program.
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Focus by Automation
I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard, not to save keystrokes but to save mental energy for the project at hand.
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Rendering "modern" Winamp skins in the browser
Writing an interpreter for a custom bytecode opens the door for rendering interactive custom Winamp skins in the browser
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Postgres vs. Pinecone
We respond to Pinecone's recent blog post comparing Postgres and Pinecone. We show that Postgres can outperform Pinecone in the same benchmarks Pinecone covered in their article.
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Optimizers: The Low-Key MVP
The query optimizer is an important part of any analytical database system as it provides considerable performance improvements compared to hand-optimized queries, even as the state of your data changes.
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Build a simple LSM-Tree storage engine in a week
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
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The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
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Functional Programming Self-Affirmations
Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming…
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Things I know about Git commits
Some of the things I've learned over a decade of Git usage, and working on writing good commit messages.
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Write OpenAPI with TypeSpec
Why TypeSpec is the best way to write OpenAPI
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The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade
If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.
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Low-poly image generation using evolutionary algorithms in Ruby (2023)
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…
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Sets, types and type checking
My currently understanding of types