9811
Meaningful Nonsense: How I generate sentences
I’m coding a system in JavaScript that generates sentences of “meaningful nonsense”. Here are some examples.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,208 posts.
9812
A seventh-grader student found a beautiful proof to Thales' Theorem (2002)
A useful theorem attributed to the probably first mathematician ever, Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC-ca. 546 BC) is one of most elementary and intuitive ever stated.
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Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
Sometimes, programming projects are too easy and boring. Sometimes, they're too hard, never ending or producing subpar results.
9814
"My Bike Is Everything to Me"
Former NBA player and TV sportscaster Bill Walton died on Monday at the age of 71. He was a quirky dude and as someone who’s been known to veer off onto seeming
9815
Bootstrapping a Forth in 40 lines of Lua code
Author: Eduardo Ochs eduardoochs@gmail.com https://anggtwu.net/ https://www.lua.org/gems/ https://www.lua.org/gems/selected.html Version: 2008feb17 Listings: http://anggtwu.net/miniforth/miniforth5.lua http://anggtwu.net/miniforth/miniforth5.out Preprint version: https://anggtwu.net/miniforth/miniforth-article.pdf
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Let yourself be monitored: EU governments to agree on Chat Control
Based on a new proposal by the Belgian Minister of the Interior, EU governments could endorse the much-criticised child sexual abuse regulation (CSAR or chat control) as early as June after all. This is what internal information leaked to Pirate Party MEP and shadow rapporteur Patrick Breyer reveals
9817
I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.
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Training is not the same as chatting: LLMs don’t remember everything you say
I’m beginning to suspect that one of the most common misconceptions about LLMs such as ChatGPT involves how “training” works. A common complaint I see about these tools is that …
9819
Qlock – A JavaScript Quine Clock
Displays the current time in a seven-segment style, embedded within its own JavaScript source code. (321 bytes)
9820
DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database
One of the many enjoyable things about databases is that they generally try to separate how data is represented internally (say on disk) from how it is used. To the point that it has become the norm to not even store the data on the same hardware that is running the queries.
9821
Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
9822
Fast Shadow Stacks for Go
tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…
9823
Donating forks to the dining hall
A year and a half ago, the dining hall would run out of forks every evening. My roommates and I would inevitably have to eat with spoons.
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Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
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API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Instead of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS, make the failure visible. Unfortunately, many well-known API providers don't currently do so.
9828
20 Years of Blogging on my own website
I missed it, but last month I had my 20-year blogging anniversary. Let's recap a bit about how it started and how it went.
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Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
9831
Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
9832
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
9833
WP21
It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’…
9834
Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero
Many large concerts feature wristbands that light up on command. They are used to produce varied visual effects across a stadium. One compan...
9835
Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. JWT stands for JSON Web Tokens, a reasonably well defined standard for authenticated tokens. Specifically they have a header with format information, a payload, and a signature or message authentication code. The core idea is that whoever has the corresponding verification…
9836
Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”
Most computer systems we interact with have an auth system of some kind. The problem is, that sentence is at best unclear and at worst nonsense. "Auth" can mean at least two things: authentication or authorization [1] . Which do we mean for an "auth system"? It's never perfectly clear and, unfortunately, we often mean…
9837
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
9838
My new PSU burns out – I fix it, and torture it by cracking water
My brand new PSU, themost complicated circuit I designed and built just recently, startedlife in October 2023. It seemed to work pretty well, at least I gott...
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Evolution of the ELF object file format
Updated in 2025-09. The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I've previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. The format consists of…