The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,178 posts.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026432 points316 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system …
TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool's shortcomings and reselling them as a "puzzle game" which is "fun" to solve.I don't want my tools to be "fun". I want my tools to be invisible.Text…
A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel...
You stumble on a weird robot chassis in an industrial warehouse. Its adorable, enormous and will likely be scrapped.
The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.
The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care
No self-signing headaches, no TLS erros.
the computer lied
Today, the European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications ("Chat Control 1.0") to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor,
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
AI changes rewrite economics because codebases with clear, common patterns get more leverage than proprietary or inconsistent systems.
I didn't expect to get so tired of reading LLM output.
If it quacks like a duck...
The snappiest chat application you've ever used is now available for self-hosting.
Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise…
Claim: as specified, the UTS #35 transliteration-rule language is Turing-complete. This is an exception in Unicode, where algorithms are deliberately bounded and always terminate. The specification defines a revisiting cursor with no rewrite limit. ICU's implementation implements a per-call cap, but the spec itself…
IP, technology & commercial law
Discover how communication patterns shape team performance, innovation, and collective intelligence. Learn why idea flow matters more than talent alone.
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
Just a few years ago, realistic local speech generation seemed unimaginable. Today, its quality is exceptional and, crucially, it delivers these results without compromising privacy.
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
Microsoft have fired most if not all of the team at id Software responsible for developing the idTech game engine during Xbox layoffs
A. Karpathy once said that OpenAI researchers are effectively "automating themselves away" by improving their AI. Right now I develop Beagle SCM with Anthropic's Fable and it is of course a brilliant model able to spot nits in a mountain of code, file tickets, make fixes. Still, yesterday it managed to commit the…
98% sounds like a lot. If someone wins the lottery 98% of the times they play, they are clearly blessed. Getting a top mark (e.g.: 10/10) on exams 98% of the time will likely lead to an honour diploma.
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES . NSA used export-law exceptions in the 1990s to entrench RC4 and RSA-512, causing security problems for decades . NSA in the…
A day has 24 hours in it. That's 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. If you wonder why Americans don't understand the need for using the metric system then ask yourself why you use this inconsistent time measurement system.
