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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
How Does Claude 4 Think? – Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken
Scaling reinforcement learning, tracing circuits, and the path to fully autonomous agents
1,145 pull requests per day
There is a recent video of Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 stating that in 2024 Stripe did on average 1,145 pull requests per day. Not just creating them, but actually finishing them; "fully shipped into production". All whilst having less than a minute of API unreliability for the
Loading Pydantic models from JSON without running out of memory
Pydantic’s JSON loading uses a huge amount of memory; here’s how to reduce it.
The "AI 2027" Scenario: How realistic is it?
Everyone’s been talking about it. JD Vance read it. What does it actually tell us?
That fractal that's been up on my wall for years
Warning: Math, Handwaving I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school instead of whatever middle schoolers are supposed to do. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I found a neat way to fill up graph paper by combining and copying squares.
I Built My Own Audio Player
In 2025, playing your own music on an iPhone is surprisingly hard, unless you pay Apple or navigate a maze of limitations. So I built my own player from scratch, with full text search, iCloud support, …
Adventures in Symbolic Algebra with Model Context Protocol
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server
Ever wanted to check on your portfolio and trade some stocks directly with Claude? Well you’re in luck.
Improving performance of rav1d video decoder
*on macOS with an M3 chip *slightly more than 1%, on a specific benchmark, without any new unsafe code A while ago, memorysafety.org announced a contest for …
Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
Ancient law requires a bale of straw to hang from Charing Cross rail bridge
The scaffolding surrounding the Charing Cross railway bridge has received an addition – two bales of hay/straw – because an ancient law requires it.
Why does Debian change software?
When I wrote Why is Debian the way it is? , a year and a half ago, I was asked to also cover why Debian changes the software it packages. Here's a brief list of examples of why that happens:
You can choose tools that make you happy
Stop falsifying your motivations.
The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Celebrating a rare dumpster fire in the kingdom of science.
Getting a paper accepted
Page 1 Accepts, the Rest Avoids Rejection
Gemini Diffusion
Another of the announcements from Google I/O yesterday was Gemini Diffusion, Google's first LLM to use diffusion (similar to image models like Imagen and Stable Diffusion) in place of transformers. …
I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it
i went to a show in november of last year (it’s may right now) and ever since, i have tinnitus. i don’t recommend it.
LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective
TL;DR: Giving LLMs the full output of tool calls is costly and slow. Output schemas will enable us to get structured data, so we can let the LLM orchestrate ...
Collaborative Text Editing Without CRDTs or OT
Matthew Weidner | May 21st, 2025 Home | RSS Feed Keywords: text editing, server reconciliation, Articulated
The Era of the Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of
Things that have a bigger impact than coding assistants
Here are 5 factors that make a bigger difference to software development outcomes than “A.I.” coding assistants, but teams don’t address because they’re “old news, gra…
Satellites Spotting Depth
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
The WinRAR approach
The WinRAR Approach: a small change in how I distribute content to keep the content free, sustainable, & ad-free.
Convolutions, Polynomials and Flipped Kernels
This is a post about multiplying polynomials, convolution sums and the connection between them.
The value isn't in the code (2022)
It takes time and a lot of skill to write great code, so surely that code is valuable, right? Wrong. You might love it and nurture it, protecting it from harm, but I’m afraid that code of yours is potentially worthless. Why? Read on.
“ZLinq”, a Zero-Allocation LINQ Library for .NET
I’ve released ZLinq v1 last month! By building on structs and generics, it achieves zero allocations. It includes extensions like LINQ to…