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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,697 posts.
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The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings
For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…
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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that…
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AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Why AI-generated event posters all look alike — and how naming a design style and era, from Bauhaus to punk fanzine, gets far better results.
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GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
Scienceblogs.de, a German science blogging portal, includes a relatively famous list of 50 unsolved ciphers, which range from cryptograms published by serial killers to the famous Voynich manuscript.
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If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit…
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Science Is Open Software
TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. Why do you care about (open source) software? - Everyone I spend a lot of my time working on software. I have been asked why software matters more times than I can…
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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
People still tell me that CPUs are boring. That nothing much happens anymore. Let us look at AMD Ryzen 7 processors from 2022 to 2024: the 5800X3D (Zen 3), the 7800X3D (Zen 4) and the 9800X3D (Zen 5). They are comparable 8-core chips with 3D V-Cache. I have written about them before, in How stagnant … Continue reading…
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There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.
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AI is an elite crime spree
Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.
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A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation…
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I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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I don't like passkeys
Why passkeys are a step back for personal security: examining account lockout risks, platform lock-in, hardware key limits, and fragile recovery flows.
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Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
Bend just serves as a useful example of my general point regarding vibe-coding as it is recent, high-profile, and has aspects that make it easy to use as an example. I don’t know anything about the author’s history with designing languages or if they actually did consider the tradeoffs below and made what I think is a…
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Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud
ZCode silently uploads full Git history to the cloud; this post provides a block rule and source review — checkpoint claims fall apart against the code.
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Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
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How to Write with an LLM
Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.
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I hate you Microsoft
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
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Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
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How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
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The most important product decision is what you don't build
Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
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C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Let’s start with a question! Is this program well-defined? 1 2 3 4 int main() { while (true) ; } If you said yes, you’d be wrong — at least before C++26. A while (true); loop with no side effects used to be undefined behaviour. Compilers were free to assume it terminates, and some — Clang in particular — would…
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Everybody's Lost Their Minds
The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.
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LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
LLMs make good classifiers but even better features
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Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
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Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
My personal website, portfolio, and blog.
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DeepSeek-v4.1 Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression
A deep dive into the DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash technical report: CED, CSA2, HSI, Single-Pass mHC, Engram and FP4 KV Cache — how the KV cache was compressed to just 890 bytes per token.
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Backups Aren't Simple
Starting from a wiped family photo drive, a walk through everything a real backup needs: snapshots, rotation, deduplication, offsite copies and tested restores.
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Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
...or how to make Qwen learn query optimization via agentic reinforcement learning