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One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan myself included must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don't get what's so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.
10 min · 2,400 words
Smitty van Bodegom walks through the complete process of decoding a PNG file—chunks, zlib decompression, scanline filters and Adam7 interlacing—illustrated with a sample image at every stage.
6 min · 1,274 words
When a glibc update accidentally breaks Chromium's audio
A debugging story from the Chromium Flatpak maintainer: a runtime update to 21.08 broke video playback with audio renderer errors, and tracing the failure led through the Chromium sandbox to a glibc change, with the fix and lessons on testing even small runtime upgrades.
11 min · 2,633 words
A clear comparison of union types and sum types: how they overlap, where their subtle differences change API design and safety, and when each model fits better in modern languages.
9 min · 1,967 words
Alex Kladov (matklad) argues that swapping std's Mutex for a spinlock to add no_std support in Rust crates is an anti-pattern, walking through how spinlocks work, priority inversion, CPU interrupts and why a spinning lock can deadlock, and proposes alternatives such as panicking when blocking is impossible.
9 min · 2,000 words
Gregory Gundersen reconstructs backpropagation from first principles, explaining why the algorithm needs a backward pass to compute neural network gradients efficiently.
6 min · 1,490 words
How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers Hacker News ranking: the gravity formula, controversy penalties after ~40 comments, title/domain penalties (including historical NSA demotion), and how ~20% of front-page stories are tweaked.
15 min · 3,547 words
A practical guide to writing C++ that actually uses the machine well—covering language and hardware basics, common pitfalls, and habits that keep hot paths fast without premature micro-optimization theater.
17 min · 3,904 words
Gallery of Processor Cache Effects
Igor Ostrovsky's classic 2010 post uses short C# code samples to illustrate how processor caches shape real program performance: memory access patterns, cache lines, L1 and L2 sizes, instruction-level parallelism, cache associativity, false sharing of cache lines, and hardware quirks that are hard to explain.
12 min · 2,685 words