The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,188 posts.
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
For fuck's sake
I spent too much time looking at too many colo(u)rs to try and optimise them for csskit. Here are some interesting findings.
A brilliant project cleverly sabotages everyday objects to reveal how much we take for granted about them — and about the design process.
A system freeze led us deep into Linux spinlock internals, where we helped find not one but three bugs in the kernel's resilient locking code used by eBPF.
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On the northern edge of Los Angeles, fresh water spills down two stark concrete chutes perched on the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a place simply called The Cascades. It’s a deceptively simple-looking finish line: the
Python 3.15’s JIT is now back on track
AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy…
You’ve read the title. Aircraft carriers of where powered by what? I was just as surprised as you are, but yes, they really did exist. I now introduce you to USS Wolverine and USS Sable:
On the Strait of Hormuz, fertility research, and the millions of dollars bet on artificial wombs that missed the point
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.
Software engineer, Warsaw.
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...
The small web is growing, and getting more active. Good news.
The Django community wants to collaborate with you, not a facade of you.
Calculus is the mathematics of approximations of continuous quantities ; number theory asks exact problems about discrete quantities. These seem, therefore, to be unrelated studies.
I don't normally do follow-ups and never this quick. After posting that last article, it was fun to read the comments on Reddit and Hacker News as they rolled in. I even found other discussions . I couldn't help wonder, "Could I have made it even more performant?" . After heading home I decided to take another look.
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
An underrated strategy for urbanist persuasion, powered by open source tools
I recently picked up a Starlink Mini to use as a backup connection for my home network. The underlying technology is fascinating - thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit delivering broadband almost anywhere. With the new £4.50 standby plan, it's an excellent way to keep things online.
Lately I’ve gotten heavily back into making stuff, and it’s mostly because of LLMs. I thought that I liked programming, but it turned out that what I like was making things, and programming was just one way to do that. Since LLMs have become good at programming, I’ve been using them to make stuff nonstop, and it’s…
What is agentic engineering? - Agentic Engineering Patterns
How to rig an index to appease a billionaire
From 15 March 2026, CAs must validate DNSSEC on CAA lookups and ACME checks. I've run DNSSEC for 14 years; see if your registrar supports it.
The decades-long battle over lawful access entered a new phase yesterday with the introduction of Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. This bill follows the attempt last spring to bury lawful access provisions in Bill C-2, a border measures bill that was the new government’s first piece of substantive legislation. The…
Some days I get in bed after a tortuous 4-5 hour session working with Claude or Codex wondering what the heck happened. It's easy to blame the model - there'...
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
