5041
"Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces
Adam Silver – interaction designer – London, UK
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,194 posts.
5042
I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
A reaction and assorted observations about Apple's September 9 Awe-Dropping event.
5043
Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity?
The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids each day - not from stone, but from code. Yet despite far more advanced tools, these systems don’t always make the experience better. So why, when KISS (Keep It…
5044
William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)
The author Ray Bradbury is one of the early science fiction authors that moved science fiction into a literary form. As a writer Bradbury constructs beautifully written stories and novels. Bradbury's writing is in stark contrast to Bradbury as a speaker. The first time I heard Ray Bradbury speak was at the Association…
5045
Boring is good
The initial, feverish enthusiasm for large language models (LLMs) is beginning to cool, and for good reason. It’s time to trade the out-of-control hype for a more pragmatic, even “boring,” approach. A recent MIT report shows that 95% of companies implementing this technology have yet to see a positive outcome. It’s…
5046
Ghost kitchens are dying
Ghost Kitchens Are Dying.
5047
The Ruliology of Lambdas
Stephen Wolfram explains the rich ruliology of lambdas, made particularly significant by their connection to practical computing. Covers basic computations to undecidability to multiway graphs and evaluation strategies.
5048
What's New in C# 14: Null-Conditional Assignments
C# 14 adds null-conditional assignment, a feature that safely assigns values to properties or indexers without long chains of if statements.
5049
Hosting a website on a disposable vape
Someone's trash is another person's web server.
5050
React is winning by default and slowing innovation
Exploring how React's dominance by default stifles frontend innovation, and why deliberate framework choices lead to better tools for performance, developer experience, and ecosystem diversity.
5051
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…
5052
Wanted to spy on my dog, ended up spying on TP-Link
I recently bought a cheap Tapo indoor camera to see what my dog gets up to when I am out of the house.
5053
Boring work needs tension
We can make our work exciting by chasing the every day tension.
5054
Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content
I have an incredibly boring summer hobby: looking at the changelog for the WebKit Github repo. Why? Because I spend a chunk of my professional life working with webviews inside mobile apps and I like to get an early peek into what's coming in the next version of iOS. Since
5055
How to self-host a web font from Google Fonts
Here's how to self-host a web font from Google Fonts - Blog-ifyer
5056
Programming Deflation
When Code Gets Cheaper Every Day
5057
CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space
These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space…
5058
How big a solar battery do I need to store all my home's electricity?
I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London. On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer and we need to buy power in winter. So here's my question: How big a…
5059
A dumb introduction to z3
Exploring the world of constraint solvers with very simple examples.
5060
The Mac app flea market
Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store? I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods…
5061
Folks, we have the best π
And some novel ideas for bicycle wheel design.
5062
Language models pack billions of concepts into 12k dimensions
In a recent 3Blue1Brown video series on transformer models, Grant Sanderson posed a fascinating question: How can a relatively modest embedding space of 12,288 dimensions (GPT-3) accommodate millions of distinct real-world concepts? The answer lies at the intersection of high-dimensional geometry and a remarkable…
5063
Which NPM package has the largest version number?
I spent way too much time on this
5064
My thoughts on renting versus buying
I've read numerous articles about renting versus buying and most dive into financial projections while completely missing the bigger picture.
5065
Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
5066
5067
Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
5068
If my kids excel, will they move away?
I grew up on a farm outside of a rural town about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. Like many small towns in America, my town knows “brain drain” – all of my friends from high school who went to college (~30% of my class) now live elsewhere, although most are pretty close by (e.g., several live in the suburbs of…
5069
Two Slice, a font that's only 2px tall
A font that's only 2px tall, and somewhat readable! Uppercase and lowercase have some different variants, in case you find one more readable than the other. Numbers (sort of) and some punctuation marks are included.
5070
An open-source maintainer's guide to saying “no”
Stewardship in the age of cheap code