https://ashvardanian.com/tags/hackers-delight/ Recent content in Hacker's Delight on Ash's Blog https://ashvardanian.com/ashvardanian.com.jpg https://ashvardanian.com/ashvardanian.com.jpg Hugo -- 0.139.2 en .xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> https://ashvardanian.com/posts/chacha-vs-aes-2025/ Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/chacha-vs-aes-2025/ AES-256-GCM now beats ChaCha20-Poly1305 by up to 3x on every modern CPU with hardware acceleration, reversing the 2015 mobile performance advice. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/less-wrong-cuda-hello-world/ Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/less-wrong-cuda-hello-world/ Moving beyond triple-bracket kernel launches to production-ready CUDA: proper error handling, CUDA Driver API, cooperative groups, and inline PTX for robust GPU code. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/longest-ptx-instruction/ Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/longest-ptx-instruction/ Exploring the 79-character mma.sp::ordered_metadata instruction for Tensor Cores on Hopper H100s, plus insights on PTX, SASS, and the evolving complexity of GPU ISAs. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/painful-strings/ Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/painful-strings/ C++ STL strings bring 20,000+ lines of code to every compilation, yet remain slower than LibC and error-prone. StringZilla offers a faster, more intuitive alternative. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/porting-cpp-library-to-ten-languages/ Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/porting-cpp-library-to-ten-languages/ Binding USearch to 10 languages reveals the friction in each ecosystem—from Python's simplicity to Java's complexity—and why C++ still rules performance-critical code. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/abusing-vector-search/ Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/abusing-vector-search/ Vector search isn't just for AI embeddings. Use HNSW for geo-spatial queries, stock covariance, chess positions, text tokens, and multi-modal recommendations with custom metrics. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/server-supercycle/ Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/server-supercycle/ DDR5, PCIe Gen5, CXL, and new CPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA converge in 2022. The biggest datacenter hardware refresh in a decade. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/simd-popularity/ Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/simd-popularity/ Analysis of 2,000+ Linux and macOS binaries reveals less than 1% of instructions use SIMD, despite CPUs dedicating massive die area to vector processing. https://ashvardanian.com/posts/whats-wrong-with-wwdc-2016/ Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://ashvardanian.com/posts/whats-wrong-with-wwdc-2016/ An iOS developer's critique of Apple's 2016 keynote — when emojis and animations overshadowed the innovations developers actually needed.