5461
OCaml as my primary language
A detailed explanation of why I chose OCaml as the ‘default’ programming language for every project.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,196 posts.
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LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
LLMs suck at comedy, art, journalism, research, and science for the same fundamental reason
5463
Cross-Site Request Forgery
Cross-Site Request Forgery countermeasures can be greatly simplified using request metadata provided by modern browsers.
5464
A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it
In this day and age of cybersecurity professionals crying out for roles, we're still seeing companies complain that there is a skills shortage and a lack of talent. A quick scan through your LinkedIn feed will show this is absolute nonsense: there is a mass of experienced, capable talent out there l
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Gartner's grift is about to unravel
swyx recognizes $IT as a visionary short in the DX Tips Magic Quadrant of Boomer Relics That No Longer Make Sense
5466
An argument for increasing TCP's initial congestion window (2024)
Introduction Google has a long history of performing networking research, making changes, and pushing those changes to the entire internet. In 2011, they published one of my favorite papers, which described their decision to increase the TCP initial congestion window from 1 to 10 on their entire infrastructure. This…
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This website is for humans
I don't want Google's shitty AI-generated ramen
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Coalton Playground: Type-Safe Lisp in the Browser
I wanted to share a side project I’ve been tinkering with for a while and finally got around to shipping: Coalton Playground – basically a web-based REPL for Coalton, which is this inte…
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Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 2
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Link to Part 3 here . As ...
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Pebble Time 2* Design Reveal
It's real and it's magnificent
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I'm worried it might get bad
Starting to worry things might get very bad, very soon
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When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army
DEF CON has alienated many hackers by officially aligning its geopolitics with those of the U.S. military and announcing partnerships with the authoritarian countries of Bahrain and Singapore.
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So what's the difference between plotted and printed artwork?
A common source of confusion that I experience when posting my artwork on social media is: _why?_ Why use a plotter when you could use a printer? It's slower. Less exact. More expensive. It fails, far too often. Inkjet printers became ubiquitous in the 1980s because they solved nearly all of these problems. So why are…
5474
SuperSight: A graphical enhancement mod for Brøderbund's "Stunts"
Clickbait disclaimer: Stunts was actually created by Distinctive Software; Brøderbund was only the publisher. But nobody heard about Distinctive , and I wanted to be sure this article does not get confused with the one about Disney's Stunt Island . Sorry about that.
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The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know
I want a new protocol, tentatively called “Let Me Know” (LMK). The purpose is to provide someone an anonymous way to get notified when a singular, specific event occurs. Here’s a basic use case: Some random blog author has published Parts 1 and 2 of a series. You enjoyed it, and you want to know…
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500 days of math
I recently crossed 500 days of practicing math daily with Math Academy. I wrote about my experience after 100 days here. TL;DR: I am still very impressed by the Math Academy system and highly…
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Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
The biggest hurdle is not AI capability, but founder pain tolerance.
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Evaluating LLMs playing text adventures
When we first set up the llm such that it could play text adventures , we noted that none of the models we tried to use with it were any good at it. We dreamed of a way to compare them, but all I could think of was setting a goal far into the game and seeing how long it takes them to get there. I just realised there’s…
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Recto – A Truly 2D Language
Recto is a 2D programming language that uses nested rectangles as its core syntax, encoding structure and recursion directly in space instead of a linear stream of text. Recto explores new ways to write, parse, and reason about code—and even natural language—spatially.
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Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
Google is killing a decade of its shortened links. Will you enlist in the fight against link rot?
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What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?
What’s the strongest model I can train on my MacBook Pro in five minutes? I’ll give the answer upfront: the best 5-minute model I could train was a ~1.8M-param…
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Progress towards universal Copy/Paste shortcuts on Linux
On Linux, Control-C and Control-V don't work for copying and pasting in terminals. The Control modifier is used for its original purpose of inserting control codes. Instead, terminal apps require an extra Shift modifier, like Control+Shift+C. But what if there were hidden shortcut combos for
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Weathering Software Winter (2022)
This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie .
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The value of institutional memory
In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an …
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The Joy of Mixing Custom Elements, Web Components, and Markdown
Custom Elements are basically Markdown for HTML
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Learn, Reflect, Apply, Prepare: The Four Daily Practices That Changed How I Live
The Four Daily Practices That Changed How I Live and Work
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Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer
Coding Tools Are Just One Front in AI’s Supply Chain Wars
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Claude Code is all you need
I installed Claude Code in June. I'd tried Cursor and Cline and Zed and a few others, but all of them felt clunky to me because I'm used to doing nearly everything in vanilla vim and my terminal. Claude Code was the first tool I tried that felt like it fit into my workflows perfectly rather than needing me to adapt to…
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I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file
Writing about software, systems, and the craft of building things.
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Faster substring search with SIMD in Zig
I've been learning a lot about low level programming languages lately, and for a long time there has been one thing that has interested me: SIMD (or 'single ins…