1
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 76 posts.
2
Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024)
Results and speed for other programs on enwik8 and enwik9 are available at the Large Text Compression Benchmark .
3
A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning (2015)
What is machine learning? See how it works with our animated data visualization.
4
The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama
Ollama gained traction by being the first easy llama.cpp wrapper, then spent years dodging attribution, misleading users, and pivoting to cloud, all while riding VC money earned on someone else's engine. Here's the full history, and why the alternatives are better.
5
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.
6
How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
7
Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability: Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will
8
We must pace the frontier
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and…
9
OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
Soundtrack: In Flames - Colony To further support my independent journalism, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $7 a month or $70 a year. If you’re subscribed to the free newsletter and logged in, you should see at the bottom right hand corner of your screen a little
10
An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
11
Show HN: How I topped the HuggingFace open LLM leaderboard on two gaming GPUs
ML, Biotech, Hardware, and Coordination Problems. Sometimes I write about hard problems and how to solve them.
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Microgpt
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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My AI Adoption Journey
My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering discovery.
14
Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)
A humorous exploration of the uncanny resemblance between AI company logos and human anatomy. Discover why circular, gradient-based designs dominate the AI industry, and what this design convergence tells us about branding in tech.
15
Policy on the AI Exponential
In one of the side plots to The Lord of the Rings , two of the Hobbits attempt to rouse Treebeard—a wise but ponderous sentient tree—to defend his forest from an army that is cutting it down. The problem is that Treebeard operates at a very different speed than the Hobbits. It takes him a full day simply to say hello…
16
Contributor Poker and Zig's AI Ban
You should always change doors when playing Monty Hall
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Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed
Across 16 coding models, hashline’s content-hash line anchors beat patch for 14 models; the weakest models gained the most.
19
The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
20
The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
21
The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
22
Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for the non-tech people in my life on what AI is starting to change — why it's moving faster than you think, and what to do about it.
23
Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
I generated 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.
24
What's the best programming language for coding agents?
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no…
25
A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to whi…
26
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Note: This has been cross-posted to my company's blog, in case you think there is some use in sharing with someone in a format that looks more authoritative. Link here .
27
Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
Some thoughts on Astra and newfangled long-horizon models.
28
They’re made out of weights
with apologies to Terry Bisson
29
Who's afraid of Chinese models?
Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.
30
The whole thing was a scam
The fix was in, and Dario never had a chance.