"A hacker, a lecturer, a father" // Adjunct faculty at @NCKU_official
Taipei/Tainan, Taiwan
Joined June 2007
- Tweets18.6K
- Following7.7K
- Followers11.9K
- Likes2
Pinned Tweet
The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide (#LKMPG) got 5000+ stars on GitHub. Thank all the contributors and promoters. We are moving forward to Linux v6.x support. Rust LKM examples will appear later.
github.com/sysprog21/lkmpg
Jim Huang retweeted
25 years ago today, we introduced the iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket.
A small team. An unforgiving deadline. We had months to bring the hardware, software, and music experience together. Proud of what we built and that it means so much to people still today. A device that has been woven in many ways into our lives. People have filled their iPods with road trips, breakups, workouts, special occasions with family and friends.
How cool that the iPod has become part of culture and our stories. 25 years, it’s hard to believe! Celebrating the team that made it happen today 👏
@StevenLevy was there from the start @WIRED wired.com/story/im-still-con…
Jim Huang retweeted
Small announcement: ✅ formal-git
As an experiment, over the last 2 months we've modelled ~30% of Git in Lean 4, making heavy use of coding agents, and proved >8000 theorems of varying usefulness about the implementation.
In the process of doing this we've uncovered >100 potential defects in Git v2.55, at least two of which may constitute security vulnerabilities. We've also built a DRT (differential random testing) harness and the biggest corpus of relevant pinned differential test cases for Git implementations with >10k unique tests at the moment.
We've used the test cases to test our own small internal implementation of Git in TypeScript. The next step will be to differentially test all notable public Git implementations against this corpus of tests to help improve their correctness and security 🫡 We'll be reaching out to library maintainers in due course.
If you have a Git implementation you'd like us to help you test, please reach out and let me know. We'll open-source all this eventually, after potential security issues that were uncovered are responsibly disclosed and fixed.
ALT Infographic: Reads: formal-git, Git, rebuilt in Lean 4, with machine-checked proofs
Jim Huang retweeted
1995: PHP is dead, learn ColdFusion
2002: PHP is dead, learn ASP.net
2003: PHP is dead, learn Django
2004: PHP is dead, learn Ruby on Rails
2010: PHP is dead, learn Flask
2011: PHP is dead, learn AngularJS
2016: PHP is dead, learn Next.js
2022: PHP is dead, learn Solidity
2026: The NSA is advising that you turn off PHP
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
My students and I are developing an AI-driven mock interview platform in Rust. Feel free to give it a try!
github.com/sysprog21/codetri…
Jim Huang retweeted
I just solved "Robotics Engineering" education with Opus 5.5 + /colorfigures skill
no need to spend $1000+ on a starter kit to learn what a resistor does, just visit my interactive site:
• 13 real boards: Arduino Uno, L298N, Raspberry Pi 5...
• build part by part: pick & place, reflow, solder, plug in
• break them on purpose: reversed caps pop, chips smoke, LEDs burn out
send the skill to your Claude:
> april-zhu.com/colorfigures
try it free, no sign-up ↓
Jim Huang retweeted
In 1994, software was dead. People told me programming was for nerds and that I should become a doctor or a lawyer instead.
In 2004, software was dead. People told me that someone from India would take my job for $5/hour.
In 2014, software was dead. People told me that no-code was going to kill every job and doom my career.
In 2024, software was dead with Devin, Windsurf, Copilot, and OpenAI o1.
We kill software every 10 years, and yet the demand for good Software Engineers has never been higher.
Jim Huang retweeted
The operational risk isn't "nobody reads it" — it's "nobody can verify it." Once the corpus exceeds what a human can load into working memory, correctness has to shift from review to verification: formal specs, property-based tests, fuzzing, model checkers. The lever that keeps safety intact while code scales past human readability is the verification toolchain (KLEE, CBMC, Frama-C, liquid types, TLA+). The teams that ship unreadable code without burning down production aren't the ones with bigger teams — they're the ones that replaced "a human read this diff" with a proof or a failing property. Everything else is just hoping the blind spot didn't overlap the edge case.
Jim Huang retweeted
Leslie Lamport is one of the greatest computer scientists alive.
In the 1980s, he wanted to write a book about concurrency, needed better macros for TeX, and spent several months developing LaTeX which mathematicians, physicists, and researchers around the world still use today.
The book never got written.
Then he continued his groundbreaking work in distributed systems theory (Paxos, logical clocks, Byzantine fault tolerance).
Some people's side projects become entire industries.
C is a programming language to honor "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG).
Jim Huang retweeted
The Singularity:
1950: Real programmers wire their own circuits.
1985: Real programmers write their own assembly.
2010: Real programmers write their own C.
2026: Real programmers write their own Python.
2027: Real programmers write their own prompts.
Jim Huang retweeted
One constant rules continuous change: the same e that compounds interest without bound also equals its own derivative and sums to itself via factorials.
e = lim (1 + 1/n)^n as n→∞
e = ∑_{n=0}^∞ 1/n!
d/dx e^x = e^x
∫_1^e (1/t) dt = 1
From population models and radioactive decay to neural nets and option pricing, continuous growth always traces back to this single base. Nature’s compounding engine is written in e.
Jim Huang retweeted
The computer that landed Apollo 11 on the Moon computed sine with a polynomial of just three terms.
sin(πx/2) ≈ 2((C₅x² + C₃)x² + C₁)x, used only for |x| ≤ 1.
The constants are not Taylor coefficients. Taylor's C₃ would be −0.3229820, the AGC stored −0.3216147, nudged so the error wiggles across the interval instead of piling up at the end.
Result: max error 1.1×10⁻⁴ versus 4.5×10⁻³ for Taylor, about 40 times better at the same cost.
Good engineering often means choosing better constants.
