The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,185 posts.
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here .
In this article, I try to understand why coding agents can be infuriating to use. I think the problem is their conversational UX: they behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don't learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repeated mistakes feel…
A sad look at the state of modern programming books.
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs,…
A blog about software craft and quality
Someone recently introduced me a weird and wonderful little board game that has become my latest obsession. It's a game for 2-12 players where horses race...
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he's fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about…
Simplified Android Development
C array types are weird. In this article I’ll explain what I find weird about them, what I’d do differently, and ramble on a few related things.
Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian's project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete . Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of…
The website of Ike Saunders
Somewhere between 'ask Claude for a quick opinion' and 'Claude is writing our Jira tickets,' we lost the plot. AI agents are brilliant implementers. They're also confidently wrong about every decision that matters. And when it all falls over, they won't be the ones carrying the bag.
Learnings from post-AI Open Source and how we’re approaching this so far.
The following pictures show $n$ unit squares packed inside the smallest known square (of side length $s$). If a pictured packing has multiple numbers in its label above, the picture represents the largest; each smaller is represented by removing any square. For the $n ≤ 324$ not pictured, the trivial packing (with no…
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI. In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly …
Today marks four years since I joined AWS. My last day will be Friday.\nI have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company.\nThis past year, while I was doing my best to make…
Why AI won't augment human capabilities much.
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
Released at the Outline Demoparty in May 2026, Ommen, NL An exploration of algorithmic density in 16 bytes of x86 assembly.
The no-bid deal is five times the size of the agency's previous contract with the Massachusetts company and could put devices in agents' hands by late June.
tiling window managers are wonderful. ultra-flexible text editors are also wonderful. for a spell, i thought i'd found the ideal solution in exwm … and i think it would have been, save for the fact that i use ordinary, graphical windows as much, if not more than, text buffers, and sometimes those windows are from…
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
