The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,187 posts.
This is a story of a most unexpected journey — one that is just starting. If somebody had told me four years ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have stared at them in astonishment or laughed dismissedly. Yet here I am, writing about a late-found hobby that has somehow become a very important part of my life.
AISI’s tests of Mythos suggest a new security economy: to harden a system you must spend more tokens finding exploits than attackers do.
I wrote to Flock’s privacy contact to opt out of their …
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…
The FPGA 386 core I've been building now boots DOS, runs applications like Norton Commander, and plays games like Doom. On DE10-Nano it currently runs at 75 MHz. With the core now far enough along to run real software, this seems like a good point to step back and look at one of the 80386's performance-critical…
NB: The title of this post is an intentional clickbait. Even though I do stand for its statement, a more honest one would be something like: It's NOT OK to compare floating-points using epsilons.
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
jj is the name of the CLI for Jujutsu . Jujutsu is a DVCS, or "distributed version control system." You may be familiar with other DVCSes, such as git , and this tutorial assumes you're coming to jj from git .
A medical professional built a patient management app using AI, exposed all patient data unprotected to the internet, and sent voice recordings to AI services without consent. Likely violating Swiss nDSG and other laws.
TLDR: Despite claiming to backup all your data, Backblaze quietly stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders - along with potentially many other things.
I asked Claude to look up the X-Plane 12 API and try to fly a Cessna from Hainan to somewhere nearby. It kept a pilot's log. Everything below is Claude's own notes from during the flight. I occasionally had to remind it to keep the pilot log running, and had to tell it when it crashed as xplane would quickly restart…
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about scaffolding and languages for managing systems of LLMs coordinating with each other — new programming languages might be the ideal solution for this area.
AI agents are getting very good at finding vulnerabilities in large-scale software systems.
You should have gone before you left Earth
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
I made a programming language. I'm sorry.
LLMs will make more of your average stuff. And that's OK. Here's how average SQL beats fancy attribution models when your agent writes the queries.
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
An archive of this year’s insane timeline of hacks few people are talking about
Customize the look and feel of tmux
The AI boom is more likely a marker of the end of the 50-year digital boom than the start of a new wave of innovation.
My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use…
The following post involves far too much discussion of the XOR swap trick. If XOR itself is unfamiliar, I have written a gentler introduction to it .
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
On your computer graphics journey, you will eventually run into some paper or code mentioning spherical harmonic functions. They are indeed a very useful tool: with just a few coefficients, they allow us to approximate a given function defined on a sphere. This can be very useful for modeling complex lighting.
A breakdown of what software development teams actually cost, what they need to generate to be financially viable, and why most organizations have no visibility into either number.
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
Apple’s accidental moat
Evolution of a self-hosting hobby: from clueless to amateur.
