61
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
The numbers clearly show this is a pointless distraction for the climate movement
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 277 posts.
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Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …
63
The AI water issue is fake
On the national, local, and personal level
64
The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles
I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October …
65
Vibe engineering
I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to …
66
Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
67
Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION, 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, 8:00 am SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION: ELECTROSTATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN INDUSTRY MODERATOR: D. Swenson, 3M 7.7 CASE STUDY - LARGE PLASTIC WEB ELECTROSTATIC PROBLEMS, RESULTS, AND CURE, D. Swenson, 3M Company Tremendous static charge…
68
Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
69
Beware of Fast-Math
One of my more frequent rants, both online and in person, is the danger posed by the "fast-math" compiler flag. While these rants may elicit resigned acknowledgment from those who already understand the dangers involved, they do little to help those who don't. So given the remarkable paucity of writing on the topic…
70
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
And a plea to think seriously about climate change without getting distracted
71
Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
72
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
Who decided these personalized Siri features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and…
73
Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?
How Chinas strategic focus on 3D printing and patent incentives since 2020 created a "minefield".
74
Things that aren't doing the thing
Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
75
Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?
Deconstructing the real costs of running AI inference at scale. My napkin math suggests the economics might be far more profitable than commonly claimed.
76
Bad Dye Job
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
77
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
78
The RubyGems "Security Incident"
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
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Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
81
Reflections
The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective...
82
The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
83
OpenAI is a systemic risk to the tech industry
Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better
84
The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)
Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)
85
The Expression Problem and its solutions (2016)
The craft of programming is almost universally concerned with different types of data and operations/algorithms that act on this data [1] . Therefore, it's hardly surprising that designing abstractions for data types and operations has been on the mind of software engineers and programming-language designers since…
86
How uv got so fast
uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.
87
Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
May 2026 update This post was written at a time of significant turmoil in my life, when multiple correlated events happened in quick succession. What I wrote in the post below is true, but a lot was left unsaid, as some things were still being investigated. At the time when I wrote the post, despite resigning from my…
88
Open Social
The protocol is the API.
89
Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Hey… quick question, why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
90
Apple Exclaves
Enhancing kernel isolation, one step at a time.