Hacker News: akdas

New comment by akdas in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

akdas — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 23:48:32 +0000

One thing that I've seen implemented to prevent that is to have the pay bands for level N and N+1 overlap. So in the time that you're doing "next level" work, you're expecting to be at the top of your current pay band, and then the promotion doesn't automatically give you a big pay raise, but it unlocks a pay band that you can go up in.

This works if performing at the top of your current level equates to performing at the bottom of the next level. That said, there's a problem where sometimes a "promotion" is really a new role, meaning to perform at the next level, you have to kind of not perform well at the current level.

New comment by akdas in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

akdas — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:16:07 +0000

Shameless plug, but I wrote some blog posts because I had a lot of the same questions. In my case, I wanted to learn the WebGL APIs, so I wrote two posts:

* https://avikdas.com/2020/07/08/barebones-webgl-in-75-lines-o...

* https://avikdas.com/2020/07/21/barebones-3d-rendering-with-w...

I still go back to them myself to refresh my memory. It's funny that I called this a lot of boilerplate, but Vulkan is known to have even more.

This won't answer all your questions, but maybe it'll answer some of them.

New comment by akdas in "Writing a Self-Mutating x86_64 C Program (2013)"

akdas — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:42:21 +0000

I was thinking the same thing. Usually, you'd want to write the new code to a page that you mark as read and write, then switch that page to read and execute. This becomes tricky if the code that's doing the modifying is in the same page as the code being modified.

LLMs are like compilers, sort of

akdas — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:15:57 +0000

Article URL: https://avikdas.com/2025/05/05/llms-are-like-compilers-sort-of.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43895991

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by akdas in "Neut Programming Language"

akdas — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 01:17:10 +0000

To expand on this: the "unit" here represents the number of possible values that can be returned.

The confusion is probably because "empty" can mean two things:

- What's inside the returned value. That may be why the parent suggested empty for the unit type. But that's now what "unit" means in the common parlance.

- How many possible values can be returned. Never returning means the function has zero possible return values.

New comment by akdas in "WASM will replace containers"

akdas — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 06:38:44 +0000

The Birth and Death of Javascript. One of my favorites! https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

New comment by akdas in "Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 4"

akdas — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:25:16 +0000

I recommend reading the previous 3 parts too, plus I'm looking forward to the next parts. I love that it goes into details and very clearly explains the problems and solutions, at least if you're familiar with C and know some things about compiler implementations.

Reflecting on ten years of my personal project

akdas — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 16:10:12 +0000

Article URL: https://avikdas.com/2025/01/01/reflecting-on-ten-years-of-my-personal-project.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575651

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by akdas in "A Simple ELF"

akdas — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:35:14 +0000

A while ago, I created an interactive explanation of the different parts of a minimal ELF file: https://scratchpad.avikdas.com/elf-explanation/elf-explanati...

I wrote this page for my own compiler that I'm working on, but I think it would be a good complement to this article. Note that the page is not that great on mobile, the extra real estate on desktop really helps.

New comment by akdas in "Immersive Linear Algebra (2015)"

akdas — Sun, 12 May 2024 01:58:29 +0000

I started on two resources on different topics. One day, I want you invest a good amount of time into building them out.

https://cstheory.avikdas.com/

https://nesdev.avikdas.com/

New comment by akdas in "How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)"

akdas — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 18:59:29 +0000

Thank you! My passion is teaching, and I created interactive visualizations for a CS theory class I taught: https://cstheory.avikdas.com/

If you're interested in collaborating for your classes, reach out to avik at avikdas dot com

New comment by akdas in "How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)"

akdas — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 18:57:34 +0000

Thank you! That means a lot to me

New comment by akdas in "How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)"

akdas — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 03:11:55 +0000

Thanks for the feedback. I replied in a sibling comment about how I made it.

For the bug, feel free to email me at avik at avikdas dot com if you'd like. The behavior I verified just now (for me) is that if you click one byte to highlight it, then clicking any other byte in the same group will remove the highlighting.

New comment by akdas in "How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)"

akdas — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 01:28:00 +0000

I wrote it all by hand :)

Lately, I've been using Svelte for interactive visualizations (see my post on using a tool called Astro with Svelte: https://avikdas.com/2023/12/30/interactive-demos-using-astro... ). But this one is all hand-written JS!

New comment by akdas in "How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)"

akdas — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 20:27:25 +0000

Writing an ELF file by hand is something I did recently: https://github.com/avik-das/garlic/blob/master/recursive/elf...

To explain the format to myself and others, I also created an interactive visualization for the bytes in the file. It helps me to click on a byte, see an explanation for it and see related bytes elsewhere in the file highlighted. https://scratchpad.avikdas.com/elf-explanation/elf-explanati...

New comment by akdas in "Implementing a Minesweeper clone for the Gameboy Advance"

akdas — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 06:24:48 +0000

All things considered, the GBA is a pretty powerful machine. Running an ARM processor is helpful too, as high-level language compilers that output high-quality ARM code are common. It's for this reason the GBA is one of my favorite machines, since it hits that sweet spot between simplicity and power.

It's the Gameboy and the NES, running a Z80-style and a 6502-style processor respectively, that typically need more hand-holding from manually written assembly code. It's not just the processor but the lack of hardware features (such as lacking multiple background layers, the relatively low number of sprites that can be on screen at a time, etc.) that result in squeezing out extra performance to overcome these limitations in creative ways. Compare that to the minesweeper game just rendering all the board cells as sprites!

New comment by akdas in "How Hackerman would create an image just by typing 0 and 1 – deep dive into GIF"

akdas — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 05:45:52 +0000

I absolutely love the "What's In A GIF" series. It's what inspired me to write my own GIF decoder while learning Erlang at the same time: https://github.com/avik-das/giferly

The first time around, I struggled a lot with decoding errors. Many years later, after being a more experienced developer, I wrote the LZW decompression with unit tests. Doing so forced me to think about each edge case, and fix issues without breaking existing functionality. Very quickly, I was able to open pretty much any GIF file I threw at it!

My Two Semesters of Teaching

akdas — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 16:17:56 +0000

Article URL: https://avikdas.com/2023/07/17/my-two-semesters-of-teaching.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36760054

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by akdas in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

akdas — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 17:30:51 +0000

https://avikdas.com

A few of my posts on dynamic programming got a fair bit of traction here on HN.

I haven't posted in a while, but after a busy few years, I have some posts lined up. I want to reflect on some teaching I did (one big reason I didn't have time to blog), as well as document me getting a new home server set up (this time with containers, finally).

New comment by akdas in "Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?"

akdas — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:51:18 +0000

I haven't written in a while, but the first year I started blogging, I set a goal to write at least one article each month for a year. I reflected on it after the 12 months. The highlights:

- I got to the front page of HN a few times. Definitely a vanity thing, but it was fun!

- My posts on dynamic programming, which got a lot of traction, resulted in someone I knew reaching out to ask me to speak at a conference they organize. The conference didn't result in much professionally, but I love public speaking. It was just a great experience.

- I mentioned off-hand that I got to talk about DP, and that got me connected with someone who was able to create a video course on the topic. I learned a ton thanks to their guidance on things like how to organize smaller chunks of information that build up to a bigger course.

- Another post about mental health got me a chance to be interviewed on a podcast. I'm a huge podcast listener, so I was ecstatic about actually being on one!

With the confidence from the 12-month experiment, I then decided to write weekly about hiring in the tech industry, a topic I'm passionate about. I kept that up every week for over a year! What came out of that is I had a bunch of thoughts floating around in my head, and now I have them documented. Now if I want to bring up something about hiring, I probably already have an article I can just link instead of explaining it from scratch. The same actually applies to some topics on my personal blog.

EDITED: Regarding that last point, I've been setting up a Raspberry Pi after a few years. Having some notes documented has been invaluable for myself.