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LLM from scratch, part 28 – training a base model from scratch on an RTX 3090
I felt like it should be possible to train a GPT-2 small level model on my own hardware using modern tools and open datasets from scratch. It was!
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
152
20 years working on the same software product
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
153
Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. An…
154
I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst
I recently submitted my PhD thesis , and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I’d write about something you (hopefully) wouldn’t notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn’t.
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Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)
The entire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule. Most importantly, there are lots of "war…
156
Reservoir Sampling
Choosing fairly when you don't know how many you're choosing from.
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Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills
Live coding measure stress, not coding skills
158
Unexpected productivity boost of Rust
Rust is known for having a steep learning curve, but in this post we will be looking at another curve, the one showing developer productivity in relation to the project size.
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Why Ruby on Rails still matters
An old tool endures in a Next.js world
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Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?
Exploring a new layout algorithm for control flow graphs.
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We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails
A look at how and why we migrated from Next.js to Ruby on Rails.
162
My LLM codegen workflow
A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.
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Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model
From the Zed Blog: A tool that predicts your next move. Powered by Zeta, our new open-source, open-data language model.
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Grok Code Fast 1
We're thrilled to introduce grok-code-fast-1, a speedy and economical reasoning model that excels at agentic coding.
166
URLs are state containers
A deep dive into how thoughtful URL design can enhance usability, shareability, and performance. Learn what state belongs in URLs, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical patterns for modern web apps.
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GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP
We showcase a critical vulnerability with the official GitHub MCP server, allowing attackers to access private repository data. The vulnerability is among the first discovered by Invariant's security analyzer for detecting toxic agent flows.
169
Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
Offline-first apps promise instant loading and privacy, but in practice, very few apps get offline support because getting sync right is surprisingly hard.
170
Programming SDF animations of Rick and Morty
An interactive guide on making animations on the GPU
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Uv's killer feature is making ad-hoc environments easy
uv run - install, activate, and run in one command…
172
Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
173
The Zed Debugger Is Here
From the Zed Blog: Over 2,000 developers asked, and we delivered. Debugging in Zed is now a reality—and it's a big leap toward Zed 1.0.
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Every HTML Element
An interactive page demonstrating every HTML element.
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How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
Gui Rambo writes about his coding and reverse engineering adventures.
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The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
177
My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
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Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server
Around the turn of the century we started to get a bigger need for high capacity web servers. For example there was the C10k problem paper.
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Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers
How difficult could it really be?
180
3,200% CPU Utilization
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...