2101
Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals
I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,187 posts.
2102
The Third Hard Problem
It’s not off-by-one errors.
2103
Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus
While starting my first year at the Colorado School of Mines, I came across a rather interesting fact: the local DNS servers will assign a subdomain to each device that connects to the network. This means that a device called “meow” will be visible as “meow.mines.edu” on any campus wifi, though the network still…
2104
3D Gaussian Splatting in a Weekend
Introduction 3D Gaussian splatting is a technique that answers this question: given a dataset of pictures of a scene, how can I reconstruct it in 3D? This is achieved using a machine learning algorithm that, for many different camera angles, does the following: render the scene, compare it to the picture taken at the…
2105
MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
MacBook Neo processor: Apple's A18 Pro, the iPhone 16 Pro chip. Geekbench 6: 3,569 single-core, between M3 and M4. Full CPU benchmarks, thermals, and $699.
2106
Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)
In the US, you can get a domain name like `somename.city.state.us` for free. If your town has its own domain, you can get nameservers from Amazon Lightsail, send the *Interim .US Domain Template* to the delegated manager for your locality, then point DNS entries at your webhost.
2107
The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
Energy matters for AI, but the decisive layers are cloud infrastructure, data, and commercialization. On those layers the United States is ahead by a wide margin.
2108
Leaving GitHub for Forgejo
I host and maintain your WordPress site: one person for your server and your site, who you message on WhatsApp. From €39 per month excl. VAT, cancel monthly.
2109
I moved my digital stack to Europe
On digital sovereignty, and why European cloud is better than you think
2110
The Emacsification of Software
Everything looks like Emacs now: personal, complicated, idiosyncratic, and shrink-wrapped around exactly what you want it to do. Does shipping software even make sense in the long run?
2111
My graduation cap runs Rust
Eric Park's website
2112
The Rise of the Bullshittery
A few thoughts on how the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.
2113
Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined
ratios will be ratios
2114
Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.
2115
Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again. I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into…
2116
2117
Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets
This article explores how to render realistic skies and atmospheres in real time in the browser with shaders, from simple sky domes, to entire planets using shaders, raymarching, Rayleigh and Mie scattering, and ozone absorption.
2118
Learning Software Architecture
In reply to an email asking about learning software design skills as a researcher physicist:
2119
Extremely Low Frequencies
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
2120
I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night
I try to pay attention to the small things that affect my quality of life. When something keeps bothering me, I want to investigate, find a likely cause, and act on it. What changed recently is what I'm willing to build to support that. With AI tooling, projects I
2121
If AI writes your code, why use Python?
For the last decade, fast-to-ship beat fast-to-run. Not anymore.
2122
Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?
30 April 2026, 16:33:37 UTC. Canonical’s incident monitoring system marks blog.ubuntu.com as Service Down.
2123
Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux
McZee meets a penguin!
2124
Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
Drag or tap a piece, then choose a square. Tap or click a placed piece to remove it.
2125
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task…
2126
How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?
Office Hours question asked by by Ian H. on May 1, 2026 Q: Memory prices could move from 15% to 40% of the BOM of a device. This seems incredible. So how can Apple deal with this? This has been on …
2127
An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
2128
Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
Dmitry.GR: Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
2129
Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability
yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead … Continue…
2130
I'm going back to writing code by hand
I vibe-coded a GPU-aware Kubernetes TUI for 7 months, archived it, and started over. Here's what AI gets wrong when projects grow complex.