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Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,203 posts.
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The current state of TLA⁺ development
The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025, which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishly titled It’s never been easier to write TLA⁺ tooling! which I…
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“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
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I don't like NumPy
it’s too hard
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Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.
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A server that wasn't meant to exist
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
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Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android
Simple tools for smart, attractive people like you
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Coding agent in 94 lines of Ruby
“It’s not that hard to build a fully functioning, code-editing agent.” Thorsten Ball
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E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper
E-COM was a $40 million US Postal Service project to deliver email on paper. Why it failed, and why spammers were its only real customers.
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Wise refuses to let us access our $60k AUD
Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it. We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful …
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Writing that changed how I think about programming languages
Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.
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I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search
I sent my CV for a role at Kagi Search, the description of the role can be found here:
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Using obscure graph theory to solve programming languages problems
Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excellent The Discoverers , which I’d strongly recommend.
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Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?
While recently traveling to the U.S., I was completely locked out of my TD Personal Banking account. TD relies heavily on SMS-based two-factor authenticat...
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It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
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PDF to Text, a challenging problem
The search engine has recently gained the ability to index the PDF file format. The change will deploy over a few months. Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format. It…
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In a high-stress work environment, prioritize relationships
How high is the stress I am talking about? You are commuting all you think is that you might snap today, you might quit today. That is what I am calling a hi...
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Lua for Elixir
Execute sandboxed Lua code on the BEAM VM using Luerl
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One hundred and one rules of effective living
In more than thirty years as a writer, editor, and publisher, I have, to my best reckoning, introduced, abridged, issued or reissued, and read nearly every major work of inspirational literature produced or translated into English.
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Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google
This is why recognizing whether a system is complicated or complex is so important: it shapes how we should approach problem-solving.
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Odin: A programming language made for me
In my book Understanding the Odin Programming Language I wrote that “Odin incorporates some of my favorite C best practices, straight into the language”. But I didn’t really elaborate on the details. Let’s do that here! This brings me to talking a bit about a previous job I had. Back in 2021 I worked at a place called…
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Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)
Neologisms for the current computing era.
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Build your own Siri locally and on-device
That doesn’t spy on you
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Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?
A security research blog.
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I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)
Update: This post received a large amount of attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.