2221
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
2222
2223
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a te...
2224
The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
2225
Agentic Coding Is a Trap
Remaining vigilant about cognitive debt and atrophy.
2226
Why TUIs are back
Terminal User Interfaces (TUIs) are making a comeback. DHH’s Omarchy is made of three types of user interfaces: TUIs, for immediate feedback and bonus geek poi…
2227
LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
" A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."
2228
Southwest Headquarters Tour
Table of Contents: Intro, Morning- Flight Attendant Training, Pilot Training., Lunch- Southwest Store, Social Media Serendipity., Afternoon- Network Operations Center, TechOps Hangar, Herb and Coll...
2229
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
2230
A desktop made for one
Philosophy - Sciences - Geekery - Art - Life - Coaching - Fun < Simplify Everything
2231
Security through obscurity is not bad
Why security through obscurity still matters: not as your only defence, but as a practical layer that raises attacker cost.
2232
Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
The toolkit for spec-driven development. Write feature specs, not prompts. Ship better software with AI agents that understand your requirements.
2233
Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
2234
Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
You might find the title a little bit odd. Hold your thought for a moment and hear me out. I'm a big believer that in technology, and life, something that…
2235
Open source does not imply open community
Open source software has existed long before the invention of the (D)VCS. The author likely hosted a barebones HTML webpage or a txt file describing the project. There definitely was an FTP server somewhere with tarballs. The author may have been reachable by email. If you were really lucky …
2236
Six years perfecting maps on watchOS
I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very…
2237
Russia Poisons Wikipedia
How state-sponsored actors exploit the open-source platform to skew reality, create 'foreign digital interference' and what that means for the future of facts
2238
2239
How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
Latest Geekbench performance figures for macOS VMs, and testing of how few cores and how little memory is really needed: could you run a macOS VM usefully on a MacBook Neo?
2240
Why are neural networks and cryptographic ciphers so similar? (2025)
Several neural network design principles are almost identical to cipher design principles.
2241
Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after…
2242
2243
Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers
A technique for accurate text and numbers in AI-generated images: generate the layout deterministically, then ask the image model to paint on top.
2244
The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
In a time before crypto, Twitter, and AI slop, we had communities, real experiences, and beautiful TV…
2245
DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two …
2246
Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
2247
Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation
My fourth month of unemployment. I'm fresh off an interview with a senior technical role advertised with a decent compensation range whose upper end would let me make median rent, and whose lower range would not. At the end of an excellent interview, I am informed that said compensation
2248
Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
2249
Full-Text Search with DuckDB
Pete Doherty is a NYC based software developer
2250
I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
Hundreds of hours, many late nights, and a working Game Boy emulator in F# with sound, running on desktop and web.