Top all-time · #677
Tristan Hume
Personal blog · thume.ca · on HN as trishumeprogrammingsystemshardware
Tristan Hume's personal blog at thume.ca covers programming, systems and hardware. Since 2012, 93 different Hacker News readers have linked it 147 times, most often “Measuring keyboard-to-photon latency with a light sensor”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tristan Hume's posts on hands-on measurement and systems projects: keyboard-to-photon latency tests, image scaling tricks, tree diffing and compilers written in Rust.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- One calls a post good, another a perfect description of frontend/backend cruft; one lists the blog as a favourite.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Measuring keyboard-to-photon latency with a light sensor10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-05-31
- Models of Generics and Metaprogramming: Go, Rust, Swift, D and More9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-09-11
- My Tungsten Cube (2019)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-09-06
- Designing a Tree Diff Algorithm Using DP and A*6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-04-26
- My tier list of interesting YouTube channels5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-08-02
- Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-26
- Production Twitter on One Machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe Are Fast5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-01-07
- Writing a Compiler in Rust4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-05-22
- Fragile narrow laggy asynchronous mismatched pipes kill productivity4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-05-17
- Screen Tunes4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-01-04
What Hacker News says?
It's self-reported by the logging system after glfwShowWindow() returns for the first time, so probably not 100% accurate, but reasonably close. A truly fancy system would be something like Tristan Hume's keyboard-to-photon latency system: https://thume.ca/2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/
Comment linking /2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/
on “It Can Happen to You”Submitted Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml as a story · 783 points
HN discussionNot necessarily. If you know the method used by Apple to scale down flagged images before they are sent for review, you can make it so the scaled down version of the image shows a different, potentially misleading one instead: https://thume.ca/projects/2012/11/14/magic-png-files/ At the end of the day: - You can trick the user into saving an innocent looking image - You can trick Apple NN hashing function with a pur…
Comment linking /projects/2012/11/14/magic-png-files/
on “Hash collision in Apple NeuralHash model”Submitted Photorealistic Path Tracer as a story · 637 points
HN discussionThis is a good one: https://thume.ca/2020/07/19/my-youtube-tier-list/
Comment linking /2020/07/19/my-youtube-tier-list/
on “One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks”Submitted Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer as a story · 572 points
HN discussionSpectacle is nice, but may I direct you toward hammerspoon (general purpose OS X workflow 'wrangler'), e.g window management: http://thume.ca/2016/07/16/advanced-hackery-with-the-hammers...
Comment linking /2016/07/16/advanced-hackery-with-the-hammerspoon-window-manager/
on “Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard”Submitted Disassembling Sublime Text as a story · 419 points
HN discussionCover topics around software development, math, programming languages, and academia: http://stuffwithstuff.com/ https://ericlippert.com/ http://thume.ca/archive.html https://medium.com/@mdwdotla https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/posts https://computinged.wordpress.com/ https://blog.acolyer.org/ https://blog.sigplan.org/blog/ https://blog.paranoidcoding.com/ https://blog.regehr.org/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ h…
Comment linking /archive.html
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS as a story · 346 points
HN discussionIs possible to see the code of this project? And is the same of http://thume.ca/2019/04/18/writing-a-compiler-in-rust/ ? P.D: I'm building a relational language and my ideas mimic closely "writing-a-compiler-in-rust" ie: using pratt parsers and similar, but not see much of how do that on rust...
Comment linking /2019/04/18/writing-a-compiler-in-rust/
on “Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml”Submitted My Tungsten Cube (2019) as a story · 288 points
HN discussionTrue, but the alternative to C++ with that reasoning is Rust or Go (depending on your liking), not Ruby. And with both of these you can step around a lot of deployment issues, because a single server can be sufficient for quite high loads. Avoid distributed systems as much as you can: https://thume.ca/2020/05/17/pipes-kill-productivity/
Comment linking /2020/05/17/pipes-kill-productivity/
on “Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?”Submitted Fragile narrow laggy asynchronous mismatched pipes kill productivity as a story · 264 points
HN discussionThis is a really cool example of tree diffing via path finding. I noticed that this was the approach I used when I did tree diffing, and sure enough looks like this was inspired by autochrome which was inspired by my post ( https://thume.ca/2017/06/17/tree-diffing/ ). I'm curious exactly why A* failed here. It worked great for me, as long as you design a good heuristic. I imagine it might have been complicated to de…
Comment linking /2017/06/17/tree-diffing/
on “Difftastic, the fantastic diff”Submitted Designing a Tree Diff Algorithm Using Dynamic Programming and A* as a story · 230 points
HN discussionhttps://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/ Looks like it's just a heavy cube to use as a fidgit toy? I wanna play with it now too lol. Edit: I don't know how to link directly to a single amazon review but holy shit read the one from Richard , it should be the first https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-1-5-One-Kilo/dp/B00XZBI...
Comment linking /2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/
on “Attention is your scarcest resource”Submitted Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer as a story · 218 points
HN discussionYup. Was a lazy Google on that one. Here’s his blog entry on it: http://thume.ca/projects/2012/11/04/simple-accurate-eye-cent...
Comment linking /projects/2012/11/04/simple-accurate-eye-center-tracking-in-opencv/
on “Photorealistic Path Tracer”Submitted My DIY ergonomic travel workstation with aluminum and magnets as a story · 215 points
HN discussionApparently, 10x developers even design and build their own keyboards so they can type faster (he really did that): http://thume.ca/2014/09/08/creating-a-keyboard-1-hardware/
Comment linking /2014/09/08/creating-a-keyboard-1-hardware/
on “Photorealistic Path Tracer”Submitted Implicit In-order Forests: Zooming a billion trace events at 60fps as a story · 175 points
HN discussionWell I hoped to be on HN today for my high-effort blog post on generics and metaprogramming ( http://thume.ca/2019/07/14/a-tour-of-metaprogramming-models-... ) but at least I'm on HN for something :P Edit: And at least right before I go to bed my post technically made it on the front page in the very last slot :) I'm also glad people like my ray tracer, it was super satisfying to build, and nice to have a project th…
Comment linking /2019/07/14/a-tour-of-metaprogramming-models-for-generics/
on “Photorealistic Path Tracer”Submitted On some LCD monitors this will cause them to emit a tone (epilepsy warning) as a story · 148 points
HN discussionI mocked up a quick JS canvas page that varies the bar width and I do indeed hear the tone changing: http://thume.ca/screentunes I also put some ideas on the Github Readme including using feedback from the microphone to calibrate a width->pitch mapping to play music using your screen.
Comment linking /screentunes
on “Scroll Slow. Have Fun”Submitted Shenanigans With Hash Tables as a story · 138 points
HN discussionhttps://thume.ca/2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/ > I have a multi core machine running at speeds well above my comprehension and you are saying they can't render simple 2d primitives at speed? That just blows my mind. What are they spending the time on? Moving memory from RAM to the CPU, doing stuff in the CPU, moving the results back to RAM, moving those results from RAM to the GPU, etc. The CPU is fast, but mo…
Comment linking /2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/
on “Xi-Editor Retrospective”Submitted Measuring keyboard-to-photon latency with a light sensor as a story · 118 points
HN discussionLooks like this post is relevant: https://thume.ca/2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/
Comment linking /2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/
on “Xi-Editor Retrospective”Submitted Magic PNG Thumbnails as a story · 111 points
HN discussion
