1111
How to Exist
Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,699 posts.
1112
Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)
How tracing words can illuminate history
1113
Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer
History of the development of my windowed operating system for 32-bit Am29000 processors when I was age 18.
1114
Severance
» Mark has joined the call.
1115
Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
1116
Online Friends Are Real Friends
A few days ago I booked my flights to not only attend a professional event, but also visit and stay with one of my best friends next month. This will be the ...
1117
Algorithms on billion-scale graph using 10GB RAM: I love DataFusion
In a previous post, I was sceptical about using Apache DataFusion for graph analytics. However, after some thought and experimentation, I changed my mind. I have reconsidered my approach and now have a working implementation of basic graph algorithms, such as WCC, PageRank and MSSP. For example, I can identify weakly…
1118
The most official water costs $120k a gallon
We all learned in science class that water freezes at 0 °C or 32 °F at atmospheric pressure. But what water, exactly? Even after you distill out all the dissolved salts and minerals to get pure H2O…
1119
Authorize, don't authenticate
Hold on to your data by keeping it in your own database
1120
Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor
A language model on a 1975 MOS 6502 processor, using a tiny Mamba-based language model and custom 8-bit ternary inference engine, used to generate text on a BBC Micro from the 1980s.
1121
The End of an Era
We knew this day would come. Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at […]
1122
Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way
This isn't quite right , but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check:
1123
Progressive Web Components
Introducing Elena, a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components.
1124
Let's make the worst Htmx
Learning how htmx works by building one from scratch.
1125
The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
1126
The Religion of Speed
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
1127
The AI Aesthetic
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of…
1128
I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals
We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.
1129
Train Simulator Controller
From January to July 2026, I have continued to work on my UK Class 800-inspired train simulator. There are a number of components in progress, but few newly completed: in lieu of posts about completed portions of the simulator, here’s a roundup of progress across the different hardware aspects of the project.
1130
So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂
You face certain challenges
1131
CodePen 2.0
Noting perhaps my largest personal career accomplishment, which is launching CodePen 2.0. Far more work, believe it or not, than the entire creation of the original CodePen. This isn’t the pl…
1132
Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof…
1133
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
1134
RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020)
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that.
1135
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Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.
1137
Gpiozero Flow
Back in 2015, I had the idea for gpiozero — a Python library for Raspberry Pi, making programming GPIO devices simpler by abstraction: instead of thinking about pin channels, voltages, pull-up resistors and rising or falling edges, we think about buttons being pressed and released, sensors...
1138
Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
1139
“Gravity is worth asking about”
A blog about software craft and quality
1140
The Productivity Mirage
What I once thought about programming productivity was wrong