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The Whole App is a Blob
Building a Tamagotchi-style language learning iOS app with SwiftUI character animation - on drill design, motivation loops, and where Duolingo gets it wrong.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
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John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
Software ate the world. Agents are going to eat SaaS.
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2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.
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JSDoc is TypeScript
In May of 2023 an internal refactoring PR from the Svelte repo made it to the front page of the Hacker News forums. The (superficially) controversial PR seem...
216
Stop crawling my HTML – use the API
One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers"…
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GraphQL: The enterprise honeymoon is over
GraphQL solves a real problem, but in many enterprise setups that problem is already handled by BFFs. After years using Apollo in production, I think the tradeoffs often outweigh the win.
218
Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
Announcing my latest open-source project.
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Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
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AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2
Some (well-known) consequences of AI automating work
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The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?
In 1950, while discussing the recent wave of flying saucer reports over lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a simple question. There …
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Bye, Mom
I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.
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Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
224
My Gift to the Rustdoc Team
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
225
If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain?
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
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From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4
An informal introduction to formality in Lean 4
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Closures as Win32 Window Procedures
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator…
228
Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo
We have hundreds of easter-egg logos (featuring our friendly mascot Dax Brown) that surface when you make certain queries on our search engine. Our subreddit is trying to catch ‘em all. They’ve certainly caught a lot, currently 504, but we keep adding more so it’s a moving target. The total as of this post is 594. I’m…
229
Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's
Loved reading through GReg TeChnoLogY Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st’s and seeing the list of los...
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I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs . It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text…
231
The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
232
I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
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30 years of <br> tags
Three decades of making things on the internet
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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison20251,750 points1,049 commentscited by 16Society, Policy & Culture details
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
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OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just …
236
50 years of proof assistants
Crackpots ranging from billionaire Peter Thiel to random YouTube influencers claim that science has been stagnating for the past 50 years. They admit that computing is an exception: they don’t pretend that my personal 32GB laptop is not an advance over the 16MB mainframe that served the whole Caltech community when I…
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CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy
This little postage stamp is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2, complete with eMMC storage and WiFi. But you can't get one. Well, not unless you buy the CM0NANO development board from EDAtec, or you live in China. This little guy doesn't have an HDMI port, Ethernet, or even USB. It's a special version of the…
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Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers
A summary of the techniques in place to protect my git forge
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The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere