The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,174 posts.
There was a joke at the time that although the National Security Agency had opened up in recent years and started taking their defensive role more seriously, the one aspect of cryptography which they would never discuss publicly was side channel attacks — and this itself constituted a side channel, revealing the…
Edit: Woah, this took off! If you want more details you can subscribe at the bottom of the post or on YouTube. I’m working on a more detailed highlights/commentary post and video. Previously: We got Claude Code playing Factorio, Towards beating Factorio autonomously, and Faketorio: an agent testbed I got GPT-5.6 Sol…
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been…
We have seen in a previous post that switch statements are more complex than they seem. The compiler is able to implement them as a decision tree (even though maybe it shouldn't). Is that everything it can do?
For a long time I have been a fan of minimalism in my physical life: have few physical possessions, and try to do more with less. Four years ago, I wrote this blog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that I travel around with.
Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no l...
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
tl;dr: You can now run many BeOS versions in the browser at Infinite Mac , my site where you can experience the Macintosh Cinematic Universe from 1984 to 2005. The installs are full peers to their Mac cousins: you can boot them instantly (large disks are streamed in), play around with pre-installed software from…
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
Yesterday, Anthropic were compromised and used to stage a global supply chain attack.
I've done a lot of activism for software freedom, over the years. At first it was purely for software freedom and related topics, (such as security, autonomy and privacy) but eventually this has evolved into something more holistic. I believe that the software I use should be held to higher ethical standards than only…
Look, I really didn’t want to like Duet. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and it annoys me when they do things better than the competition. But they have done it again.
Leo de Moura on Formal Proofs, AI Agents, and the End of “Trust Me” Code. Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • … More
The uncanny valley of LLMs' prose
Good developers’ caution about agentic development comes from knowing that built isn’t the same as working in production.
This is what I built for Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 — a completely handmade, logic-only Microsoft Edge Full Chain, with no memory corruption, and no AI at all! 🔥
On human connection after the Singularity.
I compiled a RISC-V CPU into Qwen 3.5 4B's weights, using its Gated DeltaNet layers as RAM. It runs C and MicroPython inside the forward passes, and Qwen uses it for exact arithmetic.
I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this […]
Several PDF implementations advertise AES-256, but generate the 256-bit key from either a very small state space, or from insecure random sources.
I've always had a fascination with reverse-engineering browser fingerprinting scripts. Most of my time has been spent looking at the usual suspects (popular fingerprinting libraries like FingerprintJS and more sophisticated scripts used by anti-bots like Cloudflare Turnstile, Akamai, and others).
Meta censored a political organisation during a national voting campaign, blamed its own automation, then claimed its automated systems had detected another automated tool.
Eleven days after Apple was notified of the eMudhra CA compromise, the git, curl and python3 that Apple ships with macOS still trust the compromised certificates.
Fuzz testing is incredibly effective for mechanically discovering software defects, yet remains underused and neglected. Pick any program that must gracefully accept complex input, written in any language , which has not yet been been fuzzed, and fuzz testing usually reveals at least one bug. At least one program…
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
Device tree files point to a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with the Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip and a cut-down Pi 4 Model A.
It has been about four months since I returned to Zig after being absent for a few years. In this time, I have written some software in Zig and reengaged with the community, online and in person. I decided to share some of that experience, including what I have liked about Zig so far and what I haven't. I'll include…
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it. What engineers still need: fundamentals, breadth, and the willingness to dive in when it breaks.
