Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 277 posts.
Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do - collect and share as many
I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.
Learn how to clone PostgreSQL databases instantly using reflinks. Turn slow template copies into milliseconds with PostgreSQL 18's new file copy options.
I gave a talk on Wednesday at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup about prompt injection, the lethal trifecta and the challenges of securing systems that use MCP. It wasn’t …
We just completed rewriting the Ghostty GTK application fully embracing the GObject type system from Zig and also verifying with Valgrind every step of the way. The result is a more feature rich, stable, and maintainable Ghostty on Linux and BSD.
I do not pretend to have more experience or understanding than the top level engineers I often see writing blogs here, but what I am is annoyed. I love rust. It's by far my favorite language, I enjoy the community and the language ergonomics. I've been able to incorporate it into projects in my day job where fit.
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!
I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough…
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …
It’s quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a “Markdown…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2025334 points192 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
Plus how American professors are fighting back against the AI onslaught, a backlash over AI models in Vogue, and more.
Take a look at these two QR codes. Scan them if you like, I promise there's nothing dodgy in them. Left is upper-case HTTPS://EDENT.TEL/ and right is lower-case https://edent.tel/ You can clearly see that the one on the left is a "smaller" QR as it has fewer bits of data in it. Both go to the same URl, the only…
Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here’s a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don’t. …
The author Ray Bradbury is one of the early science fiction authors that moved science fiction into a literary form. As a writer Bradbury constructs beautifully written stories and novels. Bradbury's writing is in stark contrast to Bradbury as a speaker. The first time I heard Ray Bradbury speak was at the Association…
Matthew Weidner | May 21st, 2025 Home | RSS Feed Keywords: text editing, server reconciliation, Articulated
Study Shows That Even Experienced Developers Dramatically Overestimate Gains
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
An investigation into The Games; Winter Challenge
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a compressed 21st century.
When I was analysing the structures of CYOA works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever la…
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
Correctness in the face of cancellations: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2025.
Got Bash and some code interpreter? Skip MCP.
