The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day. I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.
EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people. 2/04/2026: added a GitHub repository with data for this post
A fabulously gay blind Romance author.
A complete explanation of how e, è, é, ê, and ë are used in French, with rules, examples and pronunciation.
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
A stiff drink is recommended
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
Chest fridge Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air. Understanding and cooperating with Nature rather than acting against it leads to much better efficiency. My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only…
Ju ci (锔瓷), the Chinese craft of repairing broken porcelain has roots dating back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), with illustrations of craftsmen mending pots appearing in Chinese paintings as earl…
On friction, patience, and planting trees.
Editing photos as I press the shutter.
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver, by Carl Etnier.
Tom Hartmann had not planned to become a Software Mechanic.
Two AI agents, 11,345 receipts, and 1.6 billion tokens to find out what I’ve spent on eggs since 2001.
Why not benchmark with physical experiments?
For fuck's sake
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go ou…
I think I’ve finally pinpointed why it is that I have an allergic reaction when I’m confronted with a text that has me as the intended recipient, but that has been run through an LLM to change or “clean up” the wording - especially if it’s internal communication or even direct communication. Well, at the very least, I…
[2026-03-16 Mon 03:09] Since this might be prone to misinterpretation as an excuse to treat people rudely, a clarification is warranted. Being direct is not rude, and this style of communication assumes an established …
The new MacBook Neo announcement raises old questions around what rights we have (and don't have) to install software on devices we own.
There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.
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I saw this Mastodon post from Andy Wingo recently: in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comm...
In 2025, I traveled by bus in South America, starting in Lima, Peru and ending in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here are some details for anyone interested in doing the same.
One year ago, on 28 February 2025, Wikipedia user Moyogo updated the page for Angzarr with a citation to the type foundry H. Berthold AG’s 1950 symbol catalogue listing ⍼ as Azimut, Richtungswinkel , or “azimuth”, “direction angle”. Mystery solved!
