691
Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
I challenged myself to make a tiny subset of Python in C.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,175 posts.
692
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
Math as cultural institution.
693
The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
A couple years ago, GM made waves by saying that soon, all their new cars would be completely free of Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto support, instead opting for the "Android Automotive OS" in their cars. Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of CarPlay for basic safety reasons and
694
How I feel about AI
It's complicated
695
Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds
The best ice fishing in the Solar System is worth finding
696
Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro…
697
Doomscrolling ourselves to death
James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages
698
I changed my license
In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.
699
Bespoke: A programming language for people who say please
Modern programming languages are full of violence, vulgar abbreviations, and naked imperatives. Bespoke is a statically typed alternative in which exceptions are regrettable circumstances, mutexes ...
700
AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop Reloaded
My previous AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop is still up and running – it will now be my kids computer … so I needed a new one … but not a bigger one :) I spent way too much time finding…
701
AI, Tools and Transformation
It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t
702
Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
Six years ago I published a blog post Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings that received quite a bit of attention: Michael Tsai , Hacker News The Register , The Verge , and Gizmodo , among others. The blog post was about a Google Chrome bug that mysteriously exempted Google-owned sites from the…
703
The revolt of the reader
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
704
The Real Luxuries In Life
Labor Day weekend has always been the back to school marker for me. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me a list yesterday.
705
There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A _business_ will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.
706
The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
707
Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory
A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust's peculiarities, from a C++ developer's perspective.
708
.gitignore Everything by Default
An opposite view on .gitignore files.
709
710
A bizarre Commodore 64 peripheral, a mime, and some pretty bad ads
Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.
711
AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
AI-assisted incident response can lower MTTR while leaving engineers less prepared for the complex incidents automation cannot solve.
712
Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
713
The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
The transition to the Rust version of the React Compiler for the 1,036-file React Router codebase resulted in a significant speed increase, improving build times from 14.3 seconds to 0.81 seconds. The new compiler addresses previous limitations and ensures consistency across the toolchain, making it easier to manage…
714
715
The NX bit is not just about security
While I’m taking a short break from low-level programming, here’s a story by a friend of mine, Sonya, about debugging a seemingly impossible bug in ARM code. This bug hunting saga started several months ago. While developing a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM64 for postmarketOS, I hit a strange bug: if I enabled the…
716
Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way?
717
Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
718
Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
719
Simple Is Not Small
small programs hide coupling
720
The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh…