The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
A couple years ago, my wife began knitting. And when she takes an interest in something, she goes all in. She’s a perfectionist about learning a new craft, so in a short amount of time, she’s gotten pretty damn good. I can’t even pretend to know anything
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk…
A deep dive into Meta's pyrefly and Astral's ty - two new Rust-based Python type checkers that both promise faster performance and better type inference.
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
One scientist did it twice
AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust for both data and control planes.
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.
How to Use Python in C
Explore Bill Benter’s iconic horse betting strategy, enhanced with modern code and contrasted against three decades of evolving data.
On the return of texture, depth, and expressiveness in UI.
Power Failure by William Cohan chronicles the spectacular collapse of General Electric, once America's most valuable company. From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon.
Anthropic publish most of the system prompts for their chat models as part of their release notes. They recently shared the new prompts for both Claude Opus 4 and Claude …
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine.
A Minecraft clone made with pure HTML & CSS – no JavaScript.
💡Update May 26, 2025: I've published the source code for TeleMessage Explorer: a new open source research tool I've been digging through the 410 GB of Java heap dumps from TeleMessage's archive server, provided by DDoSecrets. Here's a description of the dataset, some of my initial
Hacker News was written in the Arc lisp dialect, a dialect created by Paul Graham. Arc was implemented on top of Racket, but that has now changed. HN runs on top of SBCL since (at least) September of 2024.But why? For performance reasons. I recently noticed that Hacker News no longer uses paging for long threads. In…
In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream Git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every…
I've spent the last week or two writing code to make sense of the massive hack of data from TeleMessage, the comically insecure company that makes a modified Signal app that Trump's former national security advisor Mike Waltz was caught using. I've decided to publish my code
This is part 1 of a multi-part series on grass rendering. We’ll start by figuring out how realistic grass should look like, and how herbage can be modeled with the tools we have at our disposal in real-time 3D graphics. Then, we’ll look at how to implement different methods of grass rendering in Godot. However, most…
If you don't care about the explanation and want a direct link to the simulation, here you go .
How to use the `timeout` command to terminate processes after a specified time and how to combine it with `until` for smarter shell scripting.
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world. Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes. Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus …
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Ten years ago this week, in May 2015, the JSON Web Token (JWT) became RFC 7519 . This was the culmination of a 4.5 year journey to create a simple JSON-based security token format and underlying JSON-based cryptographic standards. The full set of RFCs published together was:
The Noam Chomsky Website.
