The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
I never thought it could happen to me. I mean, parentheses? In this day and age? But for the past couple years, my go-to programming language for fun side projects has been a little Lisp dialect called Janet. (print "hey janet") I like Janet so much that I wrote an entire book about it, and put it on The Internet for…
A cron job for every man, woman, and child.
Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. I only had a single low res (by todays standards) screen, yet I felt like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish - deftly navigating more than nine displays without thinking, muscle and spatial memory working seamlessly together. TLDR; I built an app to…
Somehow, Palpatine returned.
An investigation into collapse of Github and how the decay of our tech infrastructure is a crime against software. Detailed comparisons of Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, and more from a distributed systems and software performance expert.
Let’s say you’re writing an image processing program. The program takes in an image, converts it to floating point, does some processing and finally saves the modified pixels to disk as 8-bit colors. The question today concerns how exactly the integer-to-float conversion should be done. There are two approaches which…
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
2026 legacy lab summer camp plan
GOG is great. I bought a few old games from them: SimCity 2000, Theme Hospital, Syndicate Plus. And by old games, I mean games from my childhood that still
The "Stop Killing Games" movement is making progress with the advancement of California AB 1921, a bill designed to stop developers from permanently bricking games when they shut down their servers. If you're a gamer who has watched a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon overnight, you're entirely justified…
Or running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU, 25 flags, 128 GB of DDR3, and a 25B-parameter MoE.
The Minibook X is a 10.5″ x86_64 sub-ultrabook with 16GB RAM, a 512GB NVMe drive, and only one majorly annyoing Linux quirk.
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it's y.
I’m having a lot of fun with reverse engineering lately, so when I was looking over the service manual for my guitar amp, a Yamaha THR10c, and saw references to a UART header in the schematic, I got excited. I wondered if anything cool was hiding in there. Next to it was a JTAG header. I knew next to nothing about…
The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion
How AI has changed the way I prototype, plan, and ship; and what I'm doing to keep my hands dirty.
Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it. I accidentally run a news outlet which is surely a liability. Sure, it has helped me "learn AI tooling" and I use many of these tools, but I didn't need them. I can't afford to maintain any of them, not in terms of time…
Since about a week, Cloudflare Turnstile (their "Verify you're human" device verification) has been looping indefinitely in my webkit-gtk based browser . Preventing access to quite few websites ( previously , but it even went worse lately). Turns out it's because Cloudflare wants to have a fingerprint of your device…
While Claude Code and Codex have significantly accelerated the automation of software development, limitations in the context window of a…
I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn't fit in a normal motherboard, macgyvered the fan with jumper wires, and now I'm running a model that ties with Claude Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks, all for £200.
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
VideoLAN announces dav2d, an open source AV2 decoder — continuing the work started with dav1d for AV1.
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The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol involved in getting the lock icon to appear in your browser next to the URL. Under the hood it uses a bunch of really cool numbers for encryption. Some numbers are considered private and need securing; some are considered public and are fine for sharing. You can mix your…
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...
