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Coding is not solved
Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,535 posts.
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Systems that no one will test
(this post figured on HNews here) This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any
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What I did at Recurse Center
I spent the summer at Recurse Center, a programming retreat in Brooklyn, at the recommendation of my friend Cory. These are some things I did there.
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Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
The technical musings of Iain Cambridge.
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Software occlusion culling in Block Game
My GPU is the integrated Radeon Vega 8 that comes with my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. I tell you this so you know that my workstation is not a graphical computing powerhouse. It is, in fact, quite weak. To its credit my integrated GPU shows up as 48% faster on UserBenchmark than the GPU in my low end hardware target; a…
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Ten lines of code that changed my world
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
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The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
A practical introduction to TLA+, why it matters for agentic coding, and how AI could take formal verification from models to machine-checked proofs and ultimately to verified software.
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Go Concurrency Distilled
Interactive mini-book on concurrent programming in Go.
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Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
Conversations, my federated instant messaging client for Android, started out as many traditional open-source projects do: as an attempt to scratch my own itch. Development started in January 2014 in my student dormitory, and within weeks I started dogfooding and using the client as the primary means of communicating…
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A single function Jev-like wrapper for LLMs, including vision models
I was intrigued by Jev and the self-hostable projects appearing around it, such as OpenJev and SemIf . Reading about them introduced me ...
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What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
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Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
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The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026
A lot of progress was made since last year, and I made some of it!
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What About Rails?
DHH's opening keynote had shockingly little to say about Rails.
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Sourcehut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html)
A wormable vulnerability allowed anyone able to inject text in a build log on builds.sr.ht (or other instances) to take over accounts who viewed them
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GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
On the 31st August I got an email from a customer, telling me that they had found an imitation of my data wrangling software on Github. I’m not linking to it, but here is a screenshot: It is …
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Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML
Converting Org to HTML with (ice-9 peg) in Guile: OrgWebAlchemy
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Claude's Load-Bearing Seams
Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier.Claude's load-bearing seams
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The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
Using the wiki on GitHub makes life more difficult for your users, and you as a maintainer. Use the `/docs` folder and GitHub Pages instead and keep your docs in sync with code
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Writing Rust code that's fast by asking agents to make the code faster
c’mon, try doing a breakthrough
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Can gzip be a language model?
A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …
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Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism. I read a lot of this textbook, got my fill, and probably won’t read more of it in the near future so wanted to write this…
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Attention is all you have
The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments.Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks.A...
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The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
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If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you're not managing quality right
One common take on the coding agents that I see goes something like this: “Sure, AI helps you output more code, but won’t the quality suffer?”
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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that…
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A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation…
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I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
Bend just serves as a useful example of my general point regarding vibe-coding as it is recent, high-profile, and has aspects that make it easy to use as an example. I don’t know anything about the author’s history with designing languages or if they actually did consider the tradeoffs below and made what I think is a…
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I hate you Microsoft
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.