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LLMs Are Not Fun
I got into programming because it let me turn thought into reality. If I could reason precisely, then a computer could carry out my thoughts unerringly. I could step away from tiring, ambiguous human interaction for a while.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
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A production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
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Five Years of Tinygrad
The first commit to tinygrad was October 17, 2020. It’s been almost three years since we raised money. The company is 6 people now. The codebase is 18,935 lines not including tests.
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The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves
3D printing and miniatures as a case study in how tech misses what users actually want
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Static Allocation with Zig
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
A Christmas Eve journey. Deutsche Bahn. 35 kilometers.
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Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainf*ck code results in an infinite loop, akin amost to a DDoS attack:
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You can't design software you don't work on
Only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process. That’s because you cannot do good software design…
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Huge Binaries
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
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You can make up HTML tags
Browsers handle unrecognized tags as a custom element, with no effect beyond what's specified in the CSS. This isn't just a weird quirk, it is standardized behavior If you include hyphens in the name, you can guarantee your tag won't appear in any future versions of HTML.
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Self-hosting is being enshittified
Self-hosting got harder in 2025. Here's what changed.
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My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award (blog)
Welcome to the award show everyone! Hosted by your favourite bee... Bee! 🥳 I wanted to summarise the best tools etc out there in 2025, and what better way then to put on a fake award show! And like all true award shows and Christmas themed events, let's get into
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What an unprocessed photo looks like
The image isn't even black-and-white , it's gray-and-gray: While the sensor's ADC can theoretically output values from 0 to 16382, the data doesn't cover that whole range.
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Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
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Unity's Mono problem: C# code runs slower than it should
Execution of C# code in Unity's Mono runtime is slow by today's standards, much slower than you might expect! Our game runs 2-3x faster on modern .NET compared to Unity's Mono, and in a few small benchmarks I measured speedups of up to 15x. I've spent some time investigating what's going on and in this article I will…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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MongoBleed Explained Simply
CVE-2025-14847 allows attackers to read any arbitrary data from the database's heap memory. It affects all MongoDB versions since 2017, here's a simple explanation:
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If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app
There's a quirk in the iPhone Camera app that can drive a security conscious iPhone owner crazy: if you touch your finger on the Camera app ...
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Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling
How I built MacThrottle, a menu bar app that tells me when my Mac is thermal throttling, and the journey to find the right macOS APIs.
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Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
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Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo
Based on the latest tests I've published, Django LiveView appears to be the fastest dynamic frontend (I'm sure more variables can be measured). OK…
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Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...
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How we lost communication to entertainment
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
(and Word, and Excel, and so much more) by Nina Kalinina, December 27th, 2025 (rev. 3.00 2026-01-04)
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Easel Turns One One year of building my own IDE in Clojure
Easel is an IDE written in Clojure that I've been working on for the last year. See it in action https://youtu.be/sceGtaNHxcM .
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Why is calling my asm function from Rust slower than calling it from C?
This is a follow-up to making the rav1d video decoder 1% faster, where we compared profiler snapshots of rav1d (the Rust implementation) and dav1d (the C …