7081
The Church FAQ
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,204 posts.
7082
Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat
libexpat is a fast streaming XML parser. Alongside libxml2, Expat is one of the most widely used software libre XML parsers written in C, specifically C99. It is cross-platform and licensed under the MIT license .
7083
History of Maths for Beginners
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
7084
Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?
In the quantum double-slit experiment, did the particle go through the slits or did the wave function? 1920's quantum physics has a simple answer: "NO".
7085
A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells
My journey making a Sudoku variant that doesn’t have rows or columns
7086
My teen years: The transputer operating system
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.
7087
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
Who decided these personalized Siri features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and…
7088
Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
How to figure out what the user experience should be when you don’t have time, budget, or a design team.
7089
Iconography of the PuTTY tools
In March 2025 I received an email asking about PuTTY’s “logo” – the icon used by the Windows executable. The sender wanted to know where it had come from, and how it had evolved over time.
7090
Shenmue (1999) reverse engineering reveals possible sun position oversight
So far, we’ve only really touched on some of the fundamentals of reverse engineering with one game example, but this time we’re looking at something a bit different. Shenmue (1999) is widely known for its pursuit of realism and has remained an influential series to this day, with its third game releasing in 2019. This…
7091
The Future Is Niri
The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two...
7092
7093
Wyvern's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
7094
The insecurity of telecom stacks in the wake of Salt Typhoon
Towards the end of last year, we learned that a group (allegedly affiliated with the Chinese government, referred to as “Salt Typhoon”) breached T-Mobile and other telecommunications co…
7095
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of opener
7096
A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024)
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
7097
Sorting algorithms with CUDA
Building on my previous post on sorting algorithms, I implemented the same algorithms using CUDA to explore performance improvements through parallel computing. The goal is to see how we can leverage the power of parallel computing to speed up our sorting algorithms. I went for a NVIDIA recruiting event some days ago…
7098
Backyard Cyanide
There’s a bushy tree in my backyard with these dark red fruit — the kind that makes some primal instinct scream at you across millennia, but you can’t tell if it wants you to eat them or not.
7099
7100
What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time working on it for long stretches of time…
7101
Switching to BunnyCDN in Less Than 2 Hours
Update, 2025-04-16: I wrote a follow-up post after about a month of usage, and you can read that here. Given some recent, uh, instability in US politics, and given that everyone likes an underdog, I’ve been looking at European alternatives to my current hosting situation, which is Cloudflare. After looking through…
7102
Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
7103
People are just as bad as my LLMs
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but […]
7104
Generative AI hype peaking?
I have been a skeptic of some of the more breathless claims made for Generative AI since at least October 2023, when I participated in a panel organized by S...
7105
A technical history of Acorn Computers
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
7106
Real Chilling Effects
A extraordinary pattern of government censorship and threats to speech
7107
Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
7108
Chasing RFI Waves – Part Seven
Here is part seven (the final part) of my non-fiction work about the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. You can also read parts one, two, three, four, five an…
7109
Dithering in Colour
Inspired by multiple posts on dithering, I set out to create a correct implementation of Atkinson dithering with support for RGB colour palettes. The post also outlines implementing linearising the colour-space and correcting for human perception.
7110
Apple Exclaves
Enhancing kernel isolation, one step at a time.