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Chase the Devil
Personal blog · chasethedevil.github.ioprogramminghardware
Chase the Devil is a personal blog at chasethedevil.github.io about programming and hardware. Since 2019, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “The war of the random number generators (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link these posts as background on pseudo-random number generators (PCG, xoshiro, Mersenne Twister) and on perceptron-based CPU branch prediction. The comments cite them without judging them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A personal, independent, technical blog
Most-linked posts?
- The war of the random number generators (2020)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-10-15
- /post/the_neural_network_in_your_cpu/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-07-02
- /post/more-on-random-number-generators/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-15
What Hacker News says?
A brief introduction can be found in this post here: https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/the_neural_network_in_y... It talks about “Dynamic Branch Prediction with Perceptrons” (Jimenez 2001) which sparked the whole thing. The AMD engineers read this paper (and probably many more!), put together a development program, and shipped it.
Comment linking /post/the_neural_network_in_your_cpu/
on “How and why CPUs do “branch prediction” (2017)”Submitted SVN Is Dead (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt seems like AMD has been doing something similar for a little while already: https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/the_neural_network_in_y...
Comment linking /post/the_neural_network_in_your_cpu/
on “How and why CPUs do “branch prediction” (2017)”Submitted The war of the random number generators (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion100% agree. You can also use chacha or aes the same way. I like it. I wonder however if some streams may not be too extreme with those. https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/more-on-random-number-g...
Comment linking /post/more-on-random-number-generators/
on “A Family of Better Random Number Generators”For a view less centered on the pcg vs xoshiro world: https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/war-of-the-random-numbe...
Comment linking /post/war-of-the-random-number-generators/
on “A Family of Better Random Number Generators”That sounds like a stretch. MT got its fame when LCG is the most popular PRNG in the world, and being the first popular PRNG that is measurably better than LCG did help. In fact the current "war" of PRNGs [1] hinders the adoption of both competing generators because MT is still good enough (in spite of its known throughput issue) and people doesn't like the choice. [1] https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/war-of-the…
Comment linking /post/war-of-the-random-number-generators/
on “It is high time we let go of the Mersenne Twister (2019)”This is an interesting paper, but it has been posted to hacker news in 2020 already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25166095 I had written about it around that time on my blog, for the curious: https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/war-of-the-random-numbe... and the sequel https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/more-on-random-number-g... A neat remark from the above: Monte-Carlo simulations run at the Los Alamos…
Comment linking /post/more-on-random-number-generators/
on “It is high time we let go of the Mersenne Twister (2019)”I suppose the question is do you really need to get rid of the Mersenne-Twister? Most of the modern variants are good enough for most practical purposes. https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/war-of-the-random-numbe...
Comment linking /post/war-of-the-random-number-generators/
on “It is high time we let go of the Mersenne Twister (2019)”Already the case for more then a decade. https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/the_neural_network_in_y...
Comment linking /post/the_neural_network_in_your_cpu/
on “Bytes Are All You Need: Transformers Operating Directly on File Bytes”Yes, it did: https://chasethedevil.github.io/post/the_neural_network_in_y...
Comment linking /post/the_neural_network_in_your_cpu/
on “Dynamic Branch Prediction with Perceptrons [pdf]”