Top all-time · #6762
Bojan Nikolic
Personal blog · bnikolic.co.uk/blogprogrammingdata
Bojan Nikolic's personal blog at bnikolic.co.uk covers programming and data. Since 2013, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “The LD_DEBUG environment variable (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN links Bojan Nikolic's posts on Game of Life speed in JAX, CPU branch prediction profiling, embedding Python in Excel, and building Python Docker images with Nix. Commenters cite them as sources and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Strategy, Research Leadership, Technical Implementations
Most-linked posts?
- The LD_DEBUG environment variable (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-31
- Conway's Game of Life in Google's JAX2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-19
What Hacker News says?
Regarding the speed of GoL itself: The JAX implementation of GoL he used should be able to do 10 billion cells / second http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/blog/python/jax/2020/04/19/game-of... > Speed of execution > Looking into speed of execution was not a primary goal, but in case people are interested initial: study suggests this code will do about 10 billion cells / second on the Google Colab GPU runtime. For comparision…
Comment linking /blog/python/jax/2020/04/19/game-of-life-jax.html
on “Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life”Submitted Counting Flops and Other CPU Counters in Python as a story · 27 points
HN discussionRun a profiler on your code sometime and see how many branches it reports taking. You can easily get millions of branches per second, so 1% events happen hundreds of thousands of times. See for example this quick investigation and look at the number of branches for what's not a very big program https://bnikolic.co.uk/blog/hpc-perf-branchprediction
Comment linking /blog/hpc-perf-branchprediction
on “Wc2: Investigates optimizing 'wc', the Unix word count program”Submitted Quick-to-scale architecture for task-based processing as a story · 18 points
HN discussionA little trick to rebuild targets based on the build options: use .VARIABLES and pipe to sha256sum to create an option-dependent suffix for all built files: https://bnikolic.co.uk/blog/sh/make/unix/2021/07/08/makefile In this way a meaningful change to the makefile triggers rebuild automatically like it should
Comment linking /blog/sh/make/unix/2021/07/08/makefile
on “An opinionated approach to GNU Make”Submitted How to monitor the full range of CPU performance events as a story · 14 points
HN discussionYou can already embed Python in Excel. There's a few different projects that do this; here's one: http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/expy/expy.html The article doesn't do any close human-factor analysis of why Excel is so much more accessible than programming languages; it's the lower abstraction bar. No need to name variables in functions when you can just click on the cell you want. No need to create loops when you can dra…
Comment linking /expy/expy.html
on “The Future of Excel”Submitted The LD_DEBUG environment variable (2012) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionin nix, you have to be explicit about bringing in something, like libcrypt. otherwise it'll just never be found. so if you can get it to work outside of docker, it's pretty simple to put it in docker with all the things that are needed but nothing else: https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-and-running-docker-... https://www.bnikolic.co.uk/blog/python/nix/2023/03/23/nixpyd...
Comment linking /blog/python/nix/2023/03/23/nixpydocker.html
on “Creating an up-to-date Distroless Python Image (2022)”Submitted Isolating Python and Jupyter using firejail as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Isolated Python on Windows Using Sandboxes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An update on visualising the computational graph of a Jax program as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Automatic Differentiation of the Black-Scholes Model as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Conway's Game of Life in Google's JAX as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted “Atmo-fencing” to fight Covid-19 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted JAX: Efficient Calculation of the Hessian Matrix as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted PyTorch Architecture as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is Python popular *because* it is slow? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Air gapped / Data Diode backing up arrangement as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Ld_debug Environment Variable as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualising the computational graph of a Jax program as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Python Panel completes the future of REPL in Python? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using BERT to mine large datasets for purchasing sentiment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Redoable Graphics / Plots as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
