The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
One of my wife's guilty pleasures is reality TV, usually ones centred around dating - the more American, the better. By extension, I absorb some of this noise and I'm happy to admit I can sometimes get invested.
Thoughts, stories and ideas about of a code poet, bit juggler & logic wizard.
Preamble: The whole affair is Google’s fault and not Bear Blog’s. Huge thanks to Herman—Bear Blog’s founder and dev—for his patience and help. A month afte...
Building a fake battery, adding a USB-C port, booting from SD card, and giving a new life to a classic Linux smartphone.
This is deranged, each nation’s boomers and reactionaries attempting to outdo the others: “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” … th…
One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.
SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised…
We are building a comprehensive archive and analysis project examining published documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Our methodology involves systematically reviewing each available document with particular attention to small details and information that has received little or no public attention since the initial…
In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman's talk on the EmacsConf , it was titled "What I'd like to see in Emacs". One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was "memorable names", "I think every …
A new anonymous essay published every day in December in the countdown to Christmas.
WTF moment: Why my native OS refuses to return a "True" value.
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
Whale songs were first noticed by accident, when analysts tracking Russian submarines at the height of the cold war heard cetacean interference instead. An engineer sent some recordings to Roger Payne, a biologist friend of his, who did something that proved pivotal: he played the hours-long recordings on his hi-fi at…
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
aadil pickle's internet home
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like "prefer composition to...
You know what they say in the world of products: fast, cheap, good; pick two. That's exactly my experience when trying to find the most suitable wood finish for my hand carved wooden spoons and cups. I got tired of trying to find something food-safe, without chemical smells and that doesn't take ages to cure. So I…
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …
Last week, I started working on a new side-project. It’s a standard React app partly made up of run-of-the-mill CRUD views—a perfect fit for LLM-assisted programming. I reasoned that if I could get an LLM to quickly write the boring code for me, I’d have more time to focus on the interesting problems I wanted to solve.
ML, Biotech, Hardware, and Coordination Problems. Sometimes I write about hard problems and how to solve them.
And how to fix it with RFCs
A vibe coding thought exercise on what it might look like for LLMs to scour human historical data at scale and in retrospect.
A New Book Quietly Reveals That Israel Used Palantir In It's Terrorist Attack On Lebanon.
Common Lisp has good packaging tools, but they're different. Here we explain the what and how.
Here are ten things I learnt about public speaking.
Rant ahead: I hate TLS “Inspection” software with a burning passion and I wish we collectively as an industry would just knock it the fuck off and stop pretending it’s some great security benefit. Every time I encounter it, in whatever form, it’s a gigantic headache that makes everyone’s life worse off and as far as I…
There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995).
