DanLuu.com is the personal blog of Dan Luu, known for long-form essays that mix systems thinking with careful measurement and clear writing. The topics range from computer latency and input lag, testing versus informal reasoning, and concurrency bugs, to industry pieces on developer compensation and curated lists of programming blogs worth reading. Many posts include data, historical context, and reproducible reasoning, which is why the site is often cited in courses and shared across the developer community. The design is intentionally minimal, which puts all attention on the ideas.
128 articles from this blog
Explains new Intel CLWB and PCOMMIT instructions for managing non-volatile memory (NVRAM) and overcoming performance bottlenecks.
A critique arguing that testing is essential for complex systems, countering the claim that informal reasoning is superior.
Compares cache eviction policies like LRU and Random, analyzing their performance using SPEC CPU benchmarks and miss rate data.
The author argues that using intrinsics for high-performance code is unreliable and more work than writing assembly by hand.
A 1997 design contest analysis where Verilog users outperformed VHDL users, sparking industry debate and controversy.
Court denies preliminary approval of a $324.5M class action settlement in a high-tech employee wage-fixing antitrust lawsuit.
The article argues for using analytics and data-driven methods, inspired by hardware testing, to automatically find common software bugs.
A guide to editing binary files directly, explaining why it's useful and demonstrating basic techniques with simple tools.
Article critiques a misleading report claiming no gender pay gap in tech, using evidence from the AAUW study to refute the claim.
A historical account of Oracle's poor performance in a 1983 database benchmark and their alleged attempt to have the professor behind it fired.
An engineer reflects on a difficult college project to argue that schools should teach debugging as a core skill, not just theory.
A programmer analyzes whether math classes are useful in a software development career, based on personal experience.
Explains how data alignment affects CPU cache performance, using benchmarks and an analogy to illustrate the impact on speed.
An author critiques the overuse of PCA in data science, arguing it's not a universal solution for classification problems.
Explains why experienced teams are crucial for successful CPU design, contrasting it with the software startup world.
An article discussing how slow response times and ignored pull requests create a hostile environment for new open source contributors.
Analyzes the flaws in Hacker News and Reddit ranking algorithms and proposes a randomized solution to improve content discovery.
Explains Verilog naming conventions and safety practices to prevent hardware design errors like timing issues and clock domain crossing.
An analysis of Verilog's quirks and why seemingly logical code can fail or produce unexpected hardware synthesis results.
About The Blog This started out as a way to jot down thoughts on areas that seem interesting but underappreciated. Since then, this site has grown to
