Dan Luu

https://danluu.com/ is my all time favourite. Unfortunately hasn’t posted in 2023, but I reread old posts often.

But also... I'd hardly call it a trend because It's been a thing for as long as I've used the web; but some 'classic' style programmers seem to opt out of CSS for their personal sites. One such example is Dan Luu [0], who wrote in a post [1] that styling decreased his viewership. Additionally, it can emphasize good structure that was concealed with CSS [0] https://danluu.com/ [1] https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

Substack definitely gets a lot of things right and makes it easy to monetize a blog, but writing off other sources of content because > five seconds versus one second to sign up for a blog is a big difference. comes across as rather self-centered. When I write, I sometimes add short snippets of code and interactivity that are essentially impossible on Substack. Switching over would do a disservice to my creative expression. https://danluu.com/ is a great example of content that transcends the medium because the target audience sees the creative expression shine through. After all, if your content is really good, the medium shouldn't matter that much.

Big fan of https://danluu.com. Also recently stumbled upon one of his posts that lists various different programming blogs worth a read: https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/. Found quite a few interesting blogs from there!

Not sure what were the author's references, but "The Cool MIT Professor" reminds me of Daniel Lemire (https://lemire.me/blog/, even though he's not from MIT) and "the weird dude who writes HTML" reminded me of Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/). Both blogs are amazing and you should consider visiting them if you're interested in performance stuff.

My separation of document/non-document was not about javascript, it was about the type of functionality the site offers. I would call a site like https://danluu.com/ document focused, while hacker news is focused on being a platform for conversation and a ranked news feed. If you were to download danluu.com and brouwse it locally you wouldn't miss much, while if you where to do the same for hacker news you would only get one part of the offered experience. Javascript enables this difference to grow to much greater extents but it is not necessary to me.

I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https://macwright.org/ Where Times really shines is printed material. I find it (and Garamond) extremely easy to read. For longform screen reading, I usually prefer Georgia, Freight Text, Source Serif, and Tiempos. San Francisco is a nice sans-serif font for this, too.

Hell, I still write the HTML and push it to Github where Github Pages and Cloudflare put it up on the Web for me. I've never seen any reason to use Markup when I can just Mark my text Up in HTML pretty simply. If you write a site correctly (a site, not a webapp) it'll render in anything from the original Netscape to the Wii Browser (tested working with my site), Internet Explorer 8 (working), Links2 (working), and the latest Chrome. A site like YouTube doesn't need to work with old stuff like Netscape or IE but if your site primarily focuses on text there's next to no reason there should be Javascript on your site. Sites like danluu's[0] and Michael Norman Williams'[1] may not look the best but they just work. My website: https://www.instantfloppy.net/ (though admittedly I don't spend as much time on it as I should) [0]: https://danluu.com/ [1]: http://michaelnormanwilliams.com/

For programming and tech topics: Dan Luu's Blog https://danluu.com/ Drew DeVault's Blog https://drewdevault.com/ For a broader scope: Derek Sivers' Blog https://sivers.org/blog If you love books, Maria Popova's Blog https://www.brainpickings.org/

Also worth checking: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://danluu.com/

Dan Luu is really great. [1]. He also has a "list of programming blogs" which lead me to find even more interesting ones [2]. [1] https://danluu.com/ [2] https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/

Came here to say Julia Evans and Cloudflare blogs. Julia is high throughput blogger (both, quality and quantity). Usually, I come across a topic and want to understand "just" a bit deeper and there's a post on her site explaining what I'm looking for. Great blog. Cloudflare's posts cover depth and breadth of the field. They have, obviously, a team of people writing posts in great technical detail. In fact, right before one of the job interviews, I used their posts to understand how packet travels up the linux kernel stack and was surprised to get quizzed on that topic :). Highly recommend it. Another favorite of mine, Dan Luu: https://danluu.com/

Thank you! I was heavily inspired by Dan Luu's blog (https://danluu.com/), so I'd recommend checking that out too.

Dev needs QA/Test just like writers need editors. I was a QA manager for a while. It's been over 10 years since I've worked somewhere that had any sense of QA/Test. Now we have Horde, err, Scrum and DevOps. Proudly. It's like the industry just gave up. I don't what it's like at the allegedly highest functioning teams (environments) Google, Facebook. But out here in the wild, it's madness. Dan Luu has been best at capturing and articulating "contemporary standards" for what passes as "quality" in software development. http://danluu.com (I wish I was 1/2 as smart as Dan.)

Not updated on a daily basis, but always worth reading: http://antirez.com/ https://danluu.com/ http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ https://rachelbythebay.com/

Love Dan Luu’s writing: https://danluu.com/

Having gone through Rustlings these past few days (via https://users.rust-lang.org/t/best-way-to-learn-rust-programming/47522… I feel like the speed of the Rust compiler has gotten a lot faster since I looked at it a few years ago. And the compiler messages (once you get the hang of it; and the investment in learning the syntax is so trivially worth it in the long run) are so much richer and more helpful than other languages. So it really does "feel" like a REPL or most of the way there as a REPL (and I have one of the few wikis at our work advocating for Common Lisp that I wrote a year ago, and still actively follow Clojure groups, etc.). It's just Rust starts and runs so fast (and Cargo makes it easy and clear like Go); so that being able to re-run periodically really fast is like a REPL. Yeah there's no retained state or ability to keep a REPL running for days, etc. (though Tmux.. and nix as a repl.... more on that later), but it's reached a point where compilation is an OOM faster than before, so the loop of: read, eval, print now can include the compiler. And you get this amazing boost where if you're operating e.g. on large data (if you're a senior engineer, like Dan Luu blogs https://danluu.com/, you're often scanning codebases or log files or other metadata to answer questions); so being able to tweak and re-run even without caching at OOM faster speeds than other languages is wonderful. I can create complex refactoring scripts in Rust on GBs of data and…

> 2 of them have normal sized text and 1 has [...] No, one of them (Wikiwand) has "normal sized text", and the other two have objectively shrunken text. This is not a matter of opinion; this is fact. Both HN and Wikipedia, like I mentioned before, are overriding the text size in their stylesheets to force the main body text to display at a size smaller than the UA preferred size. Wikiwand is using the correct font scaling. If you have a problem with the size of the text on the Wikiwand page, it's because your UA is configured to show text at a size that you have a problem with. It's up to you to deal with that. For an example of what properly-sized text looks like, have a look at http://cr.yp.to or http://danluu.com. These sites are not sending any "designer" styles to your browser (aside from the 8 lines of CSS for the latter, which don't affect the text size). Besides that, your criticism of Wikiwand's design is dominated by details about its layout and not its text size. But I didn't say Wikiwand was the best layout in the world; it's not, and I don't even use it. But it's still not worse than Wikipedia's overly-designed Vector skin.

http://danluu.com is excellent.

There are two aspects to compute performance: latency and throughput. There has been a ton of work to improve throughput, but that's often come at the cost of latency, because a great technique to improve throughput is batching, to avoid the per-task overhead cost. We've also added many layers of abstraction. A seminal example is Dan Luu's "computer latency" table (2017) https://danluu.com/input-lag/, which measures the time between a keypress and visible changes on the screen, and wherein an Apple IIe has latency 5x lower than a Lenovo X1 Carbon on Windows. From some perspective, you could say that the Lenovo on Windows example is an impressive feat of engineering, considering all the subsystems involved (USB, interrupt dispatcher, input layer, windowing system, double-buffering...) This throughput-over-latency tradeoff can be seen across the entire computer landscape design.

Terminal.app is amongst the best, if these old danluu benchmarks still hold https://danluu.com/term-latency/

sure, and there are obvious pitfalls, but IMHO it's much better than going to a 100+ dates and not reflecting on what went wrong/well after any of them. (tangentially related recommended reading https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ )

Best quote over on distributed systems as applied to humans (from Dan Luu): "Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years" - from https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Here are some that come to mind right now: https://research.swtch.com/ https://danluu.com/ https://apenwarr.ca/log/

> "I'd wager that if actually tested," https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ - """The widely cited studies on mouse vs. keyboard efficiency are completely bogus ... <testing, reading, etc.> When I look at various tasks myself, the results are mixed, and they’re mixed in the way that most programmers I polled predicted. This result is so boring that it would barely be worth mentioning if not for the large groups of people who believe that either the keyboard is always faster than the mouse or vice versa."""

There are hardware reasons too, related to polling frequencies etc. Great article for those interested in the matter: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

8khz polling rate mouse and keyboard, 240hz 4K monitor (with Oled to reduce smearing preferably, or it becomes very noticeable), 360hz 1440p, or 480hz 1080p, is current state of the art. You need a decent processor and GPU (especially the high refresh rate monitors as you’re pushing a huge amount data to your display, as only the newest GPUs support the newest display port standard) to run all this, but my Windows desktop is a joy to use because of all of this. Everything is super snappy. Alternatively, buying an iPad Pro is another excellent way to get very low latencies out of the box. I really love this blog post from Dan Luu about latency. https://danluu.com/input-lag/

I used to be a huge VHDL proponent, talk about the delta cycle stuff, give VHDL classes at work to new college grads and such. And then I moved to the West Coast and was forced to start using Verilog. And in the 21 years since, I’ve never once ran into an actual simulation determinism issues. It’s not bad to have a strict simulation model, but if some very basic coding style rules are followed (which everybody does), it’s just not a problem. I don’t agree at all with the statement that Verilog fails when things become too complex. The world’s most complex chips are built with it. If there were ever a slight chance that chips couldn’t be designed reliably with it, that could never be the case. Anyway, not really relevant, but this all reminds me of the famous Verilog vs VHDL contest of 1997: https://danluu.com/verilog-vs-vhdl/

Pretty exciting breakthrough. This actually mirrors the early days of game engine netcode evolution. Since latency is an orchestration problem (not a model problem) you can beat general-purpose frameworks by co-locating and pipelining aggressively. Carmack's 2013 "Latency Mitigation Strategies" paper[0] made the same point for VR too: every millisecond hides in a different stage of the pipeline, and you only find them by tracing the full path yourself. Great find with the warm TTS websocket pool saving ~300ms, perfect example of this. [0]: https://danluu.com/latency-mitigation/

Sure, I guess? I feel like this is getting rather in the weeds and will not necessarily lead the conversation in any kind of particularly productive direction, but I will nonetheless take the opportunity to promote what I consider to be excellent writing. Dan Luu is a favorite of mine, and offers what I find to be a much more rewarding use of reading time. A sample picked basically at random: https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/