Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 1,136 posts.

Software Engineering
212

PyTorch for WebGPU

TL;DR I’ve been working on a WebGPU optimized inference and autograd library called webgpu-torch with an API that matches PyTorch. The goal is to run neural networks in the browser at speeds comparable to a Linux workstation. Many kernels have been implemented and its design is easily extensible. It’s available on NPM…

213

Why is Debian the way it is?

Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It's thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of…

217

Making Games

In March 2018, I had been a full-time indie game developer for four years. My heroes were Jonathan Blow, Lucas Pope, and Robyn and Rand Miller. I had 2,500 Twitter followers, an ambitious title under my belt with thousands of sales, and a free office in a hip coworking space near downtown Columbus, generously provided…

224

A 1.5GB string

In my previous role, I supported a Java service that operated similarly to RDP or Citrix by enabling remote UI functionality. This service relied on sessions, which consisted of interconnected Java objects that were supposed to be cleaned up either when a user logged out or after a predetermined timeout period.

226

Curl on 100 Operating Systems

In a recent pull-request for curl, I clarified to the contributor that their change would only be accepted and merged into curl's git code repository if they made sure that the change was done in a way so that it did not break (testing) for and on legacy platforms. In that thread, I could almost … Continue reading…

233

Writing an engineering strategy

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just…