The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes 1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984. In the late 1990s, when it looked like Apple might buy Be Inc. to solve its operating system problems, the Be File System was the part I…
How using AI as a bridge when doctors aren't available can improve patient-to-doctor communications in real time emergencies
I spent the past few weeks packing as many easter eggs as I could into my latest project, and in this blog post, I want to dig into some of the more interesting details! If you’re interested in animations/interactions, you’ll want to check this one out; I share a bunch of my favourite secrets and tricks. 😄
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is…
The Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate, located at the Rome Research Site (formerly Griffiss Air Force Base), tests electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment on various airframes for blind spots in the EMC equipment, or for interference by the aircraft's external munitions on the EMC equipment…
My Python code was too slow, so I made it faster with Python. For some definition of “Python”.
Vibe coding (or vibeware) is making rounds on X now. To the best of my knowledge Andrej Karpathy started the “meme” in this X entry . I find it well written and hilarious and it seems to have taken off.
I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.
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…
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
Although it might seem that AI will make it pointless, I still think it's worth blogging.
This write-up was originally posted on reddit , though I've cleaned things up specifically for this post. Due to reasons discussed towards the end of this post, I'm not entirely happy with the results and intend to take another shot at it in the near future.
I recently returned from the 2025 Annual Meeting of the “Localization of Waves” collaboration (supported by the Simons Foundation, with additional related support from the NSF), where I…
Never store embeddings in a CSV!
The hype cycle for Google’s fabulous new AI Co-Scientist tool, based on the Gemini LLM, includes a BBC headline about how José Penadés’ team at Imperial College asked the tool about a problem…
A beginner-friendly introduction to stochastic calculus, focusing on intuition and calculus-based derivations instead of heavy probability theory formalism.
Keep your calendar in a plain text file. Calendar.txt is versionable, supports all operating systems and easily syncs with Android mobile phone.
Teammate App had a publicly exposed database and told me to stop harassing them after I emailed them about it.
First part of a series of articles about writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C# using NativeAOT. This part sets the expectations and setups the project, dealing with the first difficulties.
A lengthy digression into the life of a saint
It is clear that ketamine at a sufficient dose & frequency can and does kill neurons through NMDA-driven excitotoxicity. However, what does a sufficient dose & frequency mean? There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. While it does increase neurogenesis in the only two places in the…
tools, tactics, troubles along the way
What is new in Emacs 30.1? I go through every change in the NEWS file and talk about the most interesting and useful changes.
I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands. Which befuddles me. Why, as an ingrate software nerd who has soured on software technology — talk about biting the hand that feeds — do I evince such strong sentiment about a software program?!
While the German economy is stagnating, Digital-Mittelstand may offer a solution.
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here's why I should do more.
I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…
I hate ads. I also hate tracking and bloat. But I didn't actually hate the latter quite enough to get rid of Disqus for comments. It was a free, good service, and you could turn off ads for the users (which I did).
Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.
