The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
Some argue that even if the current AI boom leads to an overbuild, it might not be a bad thing - just as the dotcom bubble left behind the internet infrastructure that powered later decades of growth. It’s a tempting comparison, but the parallels only go so far. The dotcom era’s overbuild crea
Completing a BASIC language interpreter in 2025 for replacing the very slow Mattel ECS BASIC for Intellivision.
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler
This post is about an important, but also scary, prompt injection discovery that leads to full system compromise of the developer’s machine in GitHub …
My Helix editor config and how I am using it
Microsoft is doing everything in its power to alienate users. When it's not enshittification, it's user hostility. You can't even dismiss forced reminders.
A Gaussian splat is essentially a bunch of blurry ellipsoids. Each one has a view-dependent color, using a process similar to training an AI model, you can optimize until it converges to the photos you feed in. The result is a sort of 3D photograph that can be viewed freely from any angle. Captivated by this…
This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t want to really pit the two against each other at all, and especially not with the title. I also want to…
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…
"Correct" doesn't mean "correct" when correctly using "correct"
the psql client version 18 comes with pipelining, which can speed up client-server communication. In this post, let's see how it works and how much can be g...
Long awaited first paper from Meta Superintelligence Labs is not a model layer innovation. What does this mean?
At least, they did to me ten years ago
I’ve used Mullvad as my VPN provider for a few years. Their service is good, they provide keys for 5 devices, rely on the Wireguard protocol, and offer alternative configurations as well. Despite that, my needs have changed and I wanted to be able to have granular control over DNS queries and the ability to connect my…
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
I recently shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature (unobtrusive macOS automatic updates) that was largely developed with AI.
Firefox is an open source, private browser, one of the few mainstream browsers that supports extensions on mobile (Android) as powerful as the desktop ones (A lot of extensions have been ported), with seamless sync and a customizable homepage.
If you have arrived here, you should know this is an early draft containing mostly unedited stream-of-consciousness crap because I have found it difficult to structure this topic. My latest attempt is to split this information up into multiple separate articles.
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.
Some questions are timeless, innocent yet penetrating in their simplicity. Why is the sky blue? Why do things fall? How hard must one hit a chicken to cook it? It is this last mystery of the universe that we discuss today.
Many years ago, while working at Apple and running a lab at WWDC, I met a guy who was using a piece of Apple software designed for creating interactive ads t...
I’ve been hinting on X/Twitter about my use of the Daylight DC-1 as a programming environment, and after about a year of use, it’s time to write about it in longer form. This isn’t a full product review, but rather an experience report on coding in sunlight. It’s also about the Boox Tab Ultra – which has a different…
What's the modern equivalent of flipping through CDs? Physical album cards with NFC tags that bring back the tactile joy of music discovery.
Here’s another blog post on gathering some common threads from reading recent posts. Today’s topic is about the unassuming nature of talented software engineers. The first thread was a …
The best Stratechery content from the week of October 6, 2025, including OpenAI’s Windows strategy, Sam Altman and boundless ambition, and the future of creation.
Macros are required to do some very helpful things in Rust, but this isn't an article about any of those things.
