Top all-time · #13931
Nicholas Chapman
Personal blog · forwardscattering.org · on HN as Ono-Sendaiprogrammingsystems
Nicholas Chapman writes Forward Scattering, a personal blog at forwardscattering.org about programming and systems. Since 2014, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 79 times, most often “Kolmogorov Complexity - it's a bit silly”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link this blog for posts on C++ virtual function performance and on finding which apps slow down window resizing on macOS. The comments are bare links and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Kolmogorov Complexity - it's a bit silly2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-04-22
What Hacker News says?
http://forwardscattering.org/ - You should read it if you are interested in software development, especially with C++, functional languages, high performance software, computer science, or physics.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Performance bugs – the dark matter of programming bugs as a story · 129 points
HN discussionFrom my blog > 10 years ago but sadly still relevant: "Sockets should have a flushHint() API call.": https://forwardscattering.org/post/3
Comment linking /post/3
on “It's always TCP_NODELAY”Submitted Kolmogorov Complexity - it's a bit silly as a story · 28 points
HN discussionCool. Something like this could combine nicely with my automatic painting algorithm: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44
Comment linking /post/44
on “Fluid Paint Simulation”Submitted Auto-vectorisation and parallelisation in Winter as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSounds like the padding stuff is a false sharing issue. They might want to look into putting 128 bytes of padding between the data structures as well: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/29
Comment linking /post/29
on “PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS”Submitted Performance bug with some std::map and std::unordered_map implementations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReminds me of the MS azure page taking 17 seconds to load: http://forwardscattering.org/post/41
Comment linking /post/41
on “Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?”Submitted Hash functions, one-way functions and P = NP as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes, in my view you are entirely right, Kolmogorov complexity says nothing about any complexity independent of language. The invariance theorem is true, but useless: https://forwardscattering.org/post/14
Comment linking /post/14
on “The existence of true one-way functions depends on Kolmogorov complexity”Submitted Fog Rendering as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe existence of one-way functions is also equivalent to P != NP: https://forwardscattering.org/post/33
Comment linking /post/33
on “The existence of true one-way functions depends on Kolmogorov complexity”Submitted Detecting reads from uninitialised heap memory in C++ programs at runtime as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRelated: an old blog post of mine: http://forwardscattering.org/post/3 'Sockets should have a flushHint() API call.'
Comment linking /post/3
on “40 Milliseconds of latency that just would not go away”Submitted How to Fix a Bug as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSometimes there is such a thing as the fastest code: http://forwardscattering.org/post/13 Edit: In the black book the 'ain't no such thing as the fastest code' seemed to be a bit of 'folksy' wisdom, illustrated by various anecdotes about fast code being upstaged by yet faster code. However it rubs me a little the wrong way, considering that it's not actually a true statement as demonstrated in my link above.
Comment linking /post/13
on “Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)”Submitted Special relativity, faster-than-light communication, and absolute time and space as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPlug of vaguely related work of mine: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44 One thing interesting about this kind of automatic/AI-generated art is that it forces us to examine preconceptions about human creativeness. What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?
Comment linking /post/44
on “Teaching Machines to Draw”Submitted Permutations and sorting as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMy blog ( https://forwardscattering.org/ ) uses a C++ web server too: https://github.com/Ono-Sendai/blog
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server”Submitted Superoptimisation and the fastest program to compute a function as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is my proposed solution to this kind of problem: Sockets should have a flushHint() API call: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/3
Comment linking /post/3
on “How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential”Submitted Single linearly interpolated sample to evaluate a weighted sum of two texels as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe median sort time for sorting 1048576 elements wth djbsort is 61467822 cycles: https://sorting.cr.yp.to/speed.html On a say 3.6 Ghz processor that would be around 17ms. So the number of elements sorted per second would be around 61.4 M elements/s. My parallel radix sort can sort floats (a little harder than integers) at around 165 M elements/s: http://forwardscattering.org/post/34 A serial radix sort should still…
Comment linking /post/34
on “Djbsort: A new software library for sorting arrays of integers”Submitted Intuitive Quantum Electrodynamics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionVfuncs are only fast when they can be predicted: https://forwardscattering.org/post/28
Comment linking /post/28
on “The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword”Submitted Intuitive Quantum Electrodynamics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou may be interested in our functional programming language Winter. It does auto-parallelisation (WIP) and auto-vectorisation: http://forwardscattering.org/post/22 It's not open sourced yet but will be soonish.
Comment linking /post/22
on “Multicore OCaml: Feb 2020 update”Submitted Second Quantisation – A Quantisation Too Far as a story · 1 points
HN discussion