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Traps to Developers
HTML and CSS
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,196 posts.
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Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock
Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start t…
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Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
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TextKit 2 – The Promised Land
After 4 years with Apple's TextKit 2: The promised 'better' text engine has unstable scrolling, unreliable height estimates, and viewport issues so bad that even Apple's TextEdit suffers from them. Good architecture, but the implementation makes it frustratingly difficult for real-world apps.
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The future of large files in Git is Git
Large files bloat Git’s storage, slow down git clone , and wreak havoc on Git forges.
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Bullfrog in the Dungeon
In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had built the studio’s…
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Using AI to secure AI
One of Anthropic's quieter releases recently was their "Security Review," where Claude Code can identify and fix security issues in your code. But how good is it really? In my case, will it find issues with code it helped me write for my newsletter service…
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The electric fence stopped working years ago
"Don't worry, he won't leave the porch. The electric fence hasn't worked in years, but he still won't go past it."
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The beauty of a text only webpage
There's something I love about opening a text-only webpage. They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners, the trashy ads, the email opt-ins, and the god...
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Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation
Why automation lags even as models get better
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The Timmy Trap
This is Part 2 of my LLM series. In Part 1 , I discussed how in just a few short years, we went from the childlike joy of creating “Pirate Poetry” to the despair that our jobs would disappear. My main message was to relax a bit, as companies abuse the hype cycle to distort what is actually happening.
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Is air travel getting worse?
More delays, fewer accidents, and lower prices
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Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?
How Chinas strategic focus on 3D printing and patent incentives since 2020 created a "minefield".
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When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun
How 16 Senators Accidentally Saved Democracy (Then Watched It Die)
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I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer
How I reverse-engineered PureGym's API to build a working Apple Wallet pass with PassKit, Vapor, and mitmproxy - end-to-end iOS reverse engineering walkthrough.
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Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects
HS2 has become a case study in how not to build infrastructure. But what if we’d taken a different path entirely? In this post, I imagine how the Swiss would have done it: starting with the timetable, not the project. It’s a counterfactual, but it’s not a fantasy.
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Simulating and Visualising the Central Limit Theorem
Update: this post was discussed on Hacker News I completed a Computer Science degree at uni, and bundled a lot of maths subjects in as electives: partial differential equations, vector calculus, discrete maths, linear algebra.
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I used to know how to write in Japanese
Somehow, though, I can still read it
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Blurry rendering of games on Mac
ProblemSolutionAffected GamesWhat Apple could do Problem I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023. If you game …
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We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application
We just completed rewriting the Ghostty GTK application fully embracing the GObject type system from Zig and also verifying with Valgrind every step of the way. The result is a more feature rich, stable, and maintainable Ghostty on Linux and BSD.
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Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)
The 80’s was a decade of many things — excess, greed, and big hair, to name a few — but it was also the heyday for airbrush art. As a teenager in the late 80’s, I desperately wanted an airbrush so I could paint my favorite band logos on the back of my jean jacket, and maybe make some money on the side painting…
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"Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit
I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):
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I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer
Sometimes software takes a long time to compile just due to how much code it has, like in the LLVM project. But often a build is slower than it could be for dumb, fixable reasons. I’ve had the suspicion that most builds are doing dumb stuff, but I had no way to see it. So I’ve been working on a cross-platform tool to…
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Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
Reading research papers and articles about chain-of-thought reasoning makes me frustrated. There are many interesting questions to ask about chain-of-thought…
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iPhone DevOps (2023)
I wrote earlier about my dream of developing “single-handedly” on an iPhone. Then, I wrote some more about it . The dream still lives strongly! I am now coding single-handedly in any language on my iPhone SE model 2022. But although i still like pythonista I am now using a combination of three great apps that allow me…
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Funding Open Source like public infrastructure
To protect the digital foundation of essential government services, governments should invest in Open Source as public infrastructure and shift from consumption to contribution.
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Open Banking and Payments Competition
Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily.
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That 16B password story (a.k.a. "data troll")
Spoiler: I have data from the story in the title of this post, it's mostly what I expected it to be, I've just added it to HIBP where I've called it "Data Troll", and I'm going to give everyone a lot more context below. Here goes:
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