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The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs
Who is the Assistant? We investigate the character that most modern language models inhabit when interacting with users.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 464 posts.
452
The Document Foundation ejects its core developers
Update 2026-04-07 Update: 2026-04-11 Update: 2026-04-17 Let’s kick the developers out! In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice…
453
Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics
Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics September 29, 2026 Back to main page Download PDF At present, some frontier AI labs are testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models …
454
Web-based cryptography is always snake oil
Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer “end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service, which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises “end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that it can't see your…
455
Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple and Fast
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
456
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout
Context: 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…
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SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.
459
How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes
Packing ternary numbers with efficient SIMD-friendly unpacking on binary computers
460
Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix
I have come to appreciate coding agents to be valuable tools for working with computer program code in any capacity, such as learning about any program’s architecture, diagnosing bugs or developing proofs of concept. Depending on the use-case, reviewing each command the agent wants to run can get tedious and…
461
The Z80 Membership Card (2015)
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
462
Orthodox C++ (2016)
Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
463
100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
464
JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation
Improve startup and warmup time by making optimized native code for an application instantly available when the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine starts. Achieve this by compiling application code to native code in a training run, storing the native code in the AOT cache for use in subsequent production runs. If the…