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danluu.com

danluu.com

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Software / engineering practicePerformance / optimizationAI / MLSociety / politics / economyEngineering blogs

’15’20’25
Posts
130 from 7 Sep 2013 to 24 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (11 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://danluu.com/atom.xml

2026 11

  1. “We should be more ambitious with the software we build”
  2. There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
  3. How well do agents use test and verification techniques?
  4. Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record
  5. Bug blindness
  6. There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
  7. There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
  8. The benchmarkpocalypse
  9. How does programming language affect token efficiency and correctness?
  10. Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
  11. Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

2024 9

  1. Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
  2. How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
  3. A discussion of discussions on AI bias
  4. What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation
  5. How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
  6. Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
  7. Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed
  8. Notes on Cruise's pedestrian accident
  9. Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?

2023 1

  1. How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

2022 8

  1. Transcript of Elon Musk on stage with Dave Chapelle
  2. Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
  3. Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
  4. In defense of simple architectures
  5. Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?
  6. Misidentifying talent
  7. A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter
  8. Cocktail party ideas

2021 11

  1. The container throttling problem
  2. Some thoughts on writing
  3. Some latency measurement pitfalls
  4. Major errors on this blog (and their corrections)
  5. Individuals matter
  6. Culture matters
  7. Willingness to look stupid
  8. What to learn
  9. Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
  10. The value of in-house expertise
  11. Measurement, benchmarking, and data analysis are underrated

2020 10

  1. Against essential and accidental complexity
  2. How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing?
  3. Finding the Story
  4. A simple way to get more value from tracing
  5. A simple way to get more value from metrics
  6. How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
  7. The growth of command line options, 1979-Present
  8. Suspicious discontinuities
  9. 95%-ile isn't that good
  10. Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice

2019 2

  1. Files are fraught with peril
  2. Randomized trial on gender in Overwatch

2018 1

  1. Fsyncgate: errors on fsync are unrecovarable

2017 12

  1. Computer latency: 1977-2017
  2. How good are decisions? Evaluating decision quality in domains where evaluation is easy
  3. How out of date are Android devices?
  4. UI backwards compatibility
  5. Filesystem error handling
  6. Keyboard latency
  7. Branch prediction
  8. Sattolo's algorithm
  9. Terminal latency
  10. The widely cited studies on mouse vs. keyboard efficiency are completely bogus
  11. Startup options v. cash
  12. How web bloat impacts users with slow connections

2016 14

  1. HN comments are underrated
  2. Programming book recommendations and anti-recommendations
  3. Hiring and the market for lemons
  4. I could do that in a weekend!
  5. Is dev compensation bimodal?
  6. How I learned to program
  7. Notes on concurrency bugs
  8. Some programming blogs to consider reading
  9. Google SRE book
  10. We only hire the trendiest
  11. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality review by su3su2u1
  12. su3su2u1 physics tumblr archive
  13. Sampling v. tracing
  14. We saw some really bad Intel CPU bugs in 2015 and we should expect to see more in the future

2015 23

  1. Normalization of deviance
  2. Big companies v. startups
  3. Files are hard
  4. Why use ECC?
  5. What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 v. 2015
  6. Infinite disk
  7. Why Intel added cache partitioning
  8. Slowlock
  9. Steve Yegge's prediction record
  10. Reading postmortems
  11. Slashdot and Sourceforge
  12. The googlebot monopoly
  13. A defense of boring languages
  14. Advantages of monorepos
  15. We used to build steel mills near cheap power. Now that's where we build datacenters
  16. Reading citations is easier than most people think
  17. Given that we spend little effort on testing, how should we test software?
  18. What happens when you load a URL?
  19. Goodhearting IQ, cholesterol, and tail latency
  20. AI doesn't have to be very good to displace humans
  21. CPU backdoors
  22. Blog monetization
  23. What's new in CPUs since the 80s?

2014 22

  1. A review of the Julia language
  2. Integer overflow checking cost
  3. Malloc tutorial
  4. Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"
  5. TF-IDF linux commits
  6. Everything is broken
  7. Speeding up this site by 50x
  8. How often is the build broken?
  9. Literature review on the benefits of static types
  10. CLWB and PCOMMIT
  11. Caches: LRU v. random
  12. Testing v. informal reasoning
  13. Assembly v. intrinsics
  14. Google wage fixing, 11-CV-02509-LHK, ORDER DENYING PLAINTIFFS' MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY APPROVAL OF SETTLEMENTS WITH ADOBE, APPLE, GOOGLE, AND INTEL
  15. Verilog Won & VHDL Lost? — You Be The Judge!
  16. Data-driven bug finding
  17. Editing binaries
  18. That bogus gender gap article
  19. That time Oracle tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking their database
  20. Why don't schools teach debugging?
  21. Do programmers need math?
  22. Data alignment and caches

2013 6

  1. PCA is not a panacea
  2. Why hardware development is hard
  3. How to discourage open source contributions
  4. Randomize HN
  5. Writing safe Verilog
  6. Verilog is weird