1
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 572 posts.
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Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
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Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.
4
How NAT Traversal Works (2020)
Learn how NAT traversal works, how Tailscale can get through and securely connect your devices directly to each other.
5
Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
6
As I remember London
As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice…
7
Two Hard Things (2009)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
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The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
9
-2000 Lines of code (2004)
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
10
Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
11
Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
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The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication
If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of …
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The Biology of a Large Language Model
We investigate the internal mechanisms used by Claude 3.5 Haiku — Anthropic's lightweight production model — in a variety of contexts, using our circuit tracing methodology.
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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
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Ruby website redesigned
A Programmer's Best Friend
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
18
The Chaos (1922)
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
19
A postmortem of three recent issues
A technical report on three bugs that intermittently degraded Claude's responses: what happened, why fixes took time, and what we're changing.
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Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can…
21
Entropy Attacks
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.
22
Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
Get more out of Claude Code: tell Claude what it can't see, give it a check to run, and enforce the rules that can't have exceptions.
23
AA-Omniscience v1.1: Knowledge and Hallucination Benchmark
Compare AI model performance on AA-Omniscience v1.1: Knowledge and Hallucination Benchmark. A benchmark measuring factual recall and hallucination across various economically relevant domains.
24
Death by a Thousand Slops
I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter … Continue reading…
25
Memory Integrity Enforcement
Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort spanning half a decade that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices …
26
USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard Chan School’s Atul Gawande.
27
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
Anthropic research on data poisoning attacks shows a few hundred malicious documents can "backdoor" large language models of any size.
28
Code Mode: the better way to use MCP
It turns out we've all been using MCP wrong. Most agents today use MCP by exposing the "tools" directly to the LLM. We tried something different: Convert the MCP tools into a TypeScript API, and then ask an LLM to write code that calls that API. The results are striking.
29
Locality of Behaviour (2020)
Carson Gross explores the Locality of Behaviour (LoB) principle, which emphasizes making the behavior of code units obvious on inspection to enhance maintainability. He discusses the tradeoffs between LoB and other software design principles like DRY and SoC, offering insights on balancing clarity, abstraction, and…
30
The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Inside a decade of struggle to bring a scandal to light