3451
Youth and what happens when it's gone
And what happens when it's gone.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
3452
Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair
Here’s to being a preserving student for life.
3453
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
Wealth inequality is driving the economy.
3454
Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas
Thomas Ptacek, a friend and expert witness in this lawsuit summed it up best in the court's hallway while walking within three feet of opposing counsel: "This is fucking stupid" .
3455
The “strategic reserve” exposes crypto as the scam it always was
Today, President Trump announced that the US Government would begin using taxpayer dollars to systematically buy up a variety of cryptocurrencies. Crypto prices shot up on the news. This is revealing, as crypto boosters have argued for years that cryptocurrency has legitimate economic value as a payment system outside…
3456
The Differences Between Deep Research, Deep Research, and Deep Research
Dive into the world of AI engineering with this exploration of Deep Research in report generation. Learn how LLM-as-a-judge systems, machine learning, and ev...
3457
Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
3458
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
3459
The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three
This article is available in German at Heise Online . In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long...
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GPT-4.5: "Not a frontier model"?
OpenAI's latest model raises more questions than answers, but no, the AI bubble isn't popping quite yet.
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Towards a test suite for TOTP codes
Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own…
3463
Raspberry Pi Pico audio player
A weblog about technology including Arduino, Raspberry, Attiny, 3D printing, Electronics, tinkering and all kinds of diy projects.
3464
Yoke: Infrastructure as code, but actually
Infrastructure as code, but actually
3465
What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
I have used it for a long time - 20 years now, including for a while the IceWeasel variant - and I like it as a browser.
3466
Knowing CSS is mastery to front end development
There are countless articles why developers should not focus on Frameworks too much and instead learn to understand the underlying languages. But I think rarely we can find good reasons except that Frameworks come and go. To me, the main reason is different: You won’t be a master at frontend development if you don’t…
3467
Nebu: A Spreadsheet Editor for Varvara
By Devine Lu Linvega
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Why can't we screenshot frames from DRM-protected video on Apple devices?
This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective…
3470
Xcode constantly phones home
Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…
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GLP-1 drugs: An economic disruptor? (2024)
While Silicon Valley obsesses over AI, a weight-loss drug is quietly becoming the biggest economic disruptor since the internet. Here's why your job, investments, and future depend on understanding it
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Abusing C to implement JSON parsing with struct methods
Json parsing in C using function pointers attached to a struct
3473
Making o1, o3, and Sonnet 3.7 hallucinate for everyone
My (ops-but-sometimes-writes-scripts-to-help-out) coworker just tapped on my shoulder and asked me to look at his code that wasn't working. It was a bit something like this:
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The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
This is the story of our three year long journey to turn a fleet of laptops into what can only be described as the world's most unhinged video wall.
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A Map of Python
PyPi, the Python Software Foundation's package repo, counts over half a million open source projects. Since I use many of these every day, it seemed appropriate to get to know this set of packages better, and show some appreciation. The index website provides nice search and filtering, which is good when looking for…
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Yes, Claude Code can decompile itself. Here's the source code
These LLMs are shockingly good at deobfuscation, transpilation and structure to structure conversions. I discovered this back around Christmas where I asked an LLM to make me an Haskell audio library by transpiling a rust implementation. An “oh fuck” moment in timeOver the Christmas break I’ve been critically looking
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Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)
Alright, I’ve got another conspiracy theory misconception to dispel. :) After reading through the Chrome Terms of Service, some people are worried that Google is trying to assert rights on ev…
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The cost of Go's panic and recover
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
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Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting
A few years ago I blogged about custom tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting in emacs . I started out with highlighting certain keywords in...
3480
When eBPF pt_regs reads return garbage on the latest Linux kernels, blame Fred
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the starting point of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code. Update: It turns out that there’s a…