Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 428 posts.
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.
CRDTs don't have to be all academic papers and math jargon. Learn what CRDTs are and how they work through interactive visualizations and code samples.
Amazon and Goodreads must take steps to combat the flood of AI-generated content that will mislead readers and damage author reputations.
Or "that time I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it like a week after launch"
The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. As an experienced developer, ChatGPT …
Firstyear's blog
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
This blog post is going to be a cursory overview of the internals iMessage, as I’ve discovered during my work on pypush, an open source project that reimplements iMessage.
Lessons learned from 15 years of writing SumatraPDF, a great open-source PDF, eBook, and comic book reader for Windows
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the …
You can check out a YouTube recording of a talk based on this blog post.
Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution. The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux…
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
[Sidney Harris cartoon used with permission. Copyright holder: ScienceCartoonsPlus.com .]
...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
Evals, RAG, fine-tuning, caching, guardrails, defensive UX, and collecting user feedback.
How to make your RSS feed look nice and provide useful information at the same time.
I regularly hear people asking which programming language to learn, and then reeling off a list of very similar languages (“Should I learn Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby?”). In response I usually tell them that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they get started. There are fundamentals behind them.
A capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
Six propositions for evaluating the evidence.
Exploiting a Video Camera's Rolling Shutter to Recover Secret Keys from Devices Using Video Footage of Their Power LED
"Prompt Engineering" emerged from the growth of language models to describe the process of applying prompting to effectively extract information from language models, typically for use in real-world applications.
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation : it's a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me – because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
Inside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out
An interactive guide to understanding SVG paths and path commands.
