The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,191 posts.
Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
How a video game company built an empire by inverting the playbook
Using TypeScript and some DMV API digging, I chased down and claimed one of the rarest available license plate combinations.
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
Link to: https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites…
... at least when you're doing research, not development
The informal definition of an elliptic curve is simple. The formal definition is more involved.
Recently, I made a free game . It's a little mystery investigation game which I was inspired to write after enjoying games like Case of the Golden Idol , Roottrees are Dead , and Return of the Obra Dinn . I thought my UX ideas were pretty simple, so I decided to implement it in HTML5 .
I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning.
It was yet another day at the office. Our team was internally discussing moving to a different platform analytics solution. Our team was really leaning more towards Posthog. It’s one of the brilliant -I personally believe it’s the best- products on the market. And that’s where the story has begun… We have a somewhat…
Firstyear's blog
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl. When overcommit is enabled (sadly, this is the default), the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk(2) or mmap(2) is called to increase a program’s heap size, regardless of whether or not…
Everyone's using AI wrong. Its superpower isn't writing for you. It's reading everything you've ever written and finding patterns you missed.
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
Learn the command line, version control, build systems, and correctness in NEU’s CS 4973: ISDT.
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
Ever since moving to New York City, I've found my time to be in more demand than ever. Between work, meetups, and social events, I have noticeably less time for side projects than I had before moving here. At the same time, my commute is a massive time suck. It's 30 minutes each way, which doesn't sound that bad, but…
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.
This was a fun project for a couple of days, but I will probably shelve it for now so I can continue what I was already working on before. Read on to follow along with my journey. Spoilers: I didn’t get very far.
Typography for Lawyers
I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going to use it anyway".
Blog of Guillaume Gomez (Rust GCC backend: Why and how)
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
