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They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,528 posts.
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Libghostty 1.0
libghostty-vt 1.0 is here. libghostty is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty. The 1.0 release means both the library itself and the C ABI are now stable.
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First steps in bare-metal programming using UEFI
A series of articles about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.
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My gym forced a social media down my throat. So I reverse-engineered its app
Extracting my gym’s QR check-in from its Flutter app, with a rooted phone and a lot of ripgrep.
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Building a Multi-Agent System from Scratch: Architecture Patterns
Orchestrator-worker, blackboard, and pipeline patterns for coordinating multiple AI agents — with the failure modes that only show up once you go past a single-agent demo.
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We can do better than line-buffered output
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
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The lost malloc()
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
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C++26 Disapproved
On October 23, 2026, the unthinkable happened. It was supposed to be a mere formality: C++26 was up for a vote by the ISO National Bodi...
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I dumped Apple’s word list
macOS ships a VulgarWordUsage.db and a dictionary that rates every word as vulgar, offensive or sensitive. Dumped for 199,000 English words and a dozen other languages.
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The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem
The LISP curse is often quoted as the reason why so few libraries and reusable components exist for LISP dialects. According to the concept, LISP is so power...
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LLMs are not superhuman at reading and writing neural network weights
A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra…
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Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
We find that frontier LLMs are surprisingly good at natively reading and writing neural network weights, using a variety of recent tools and algorithms or even via direct weight editing.
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Let Me Ch...
That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs. I still don’t know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I’d had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone…
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F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
From Pascal and ex tapes to a VAX system: Bill Joy handles BSD distribution and debugging, then joins Ozalp Babaoglu to bring virtual memory to Unix.
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Efficient algorithms, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and losing the plot
On efficient algorithms, the exponential time hypothesis, and losing the plot.
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Prospero: A new coding harness for a more civilized age
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been…
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Switch Lowering in GCC
We have seen in a previous post that switch statements are more complex than they seem. The compiler is able to implement them as a decision tree (even though maybe it shouldn't). Is that everything it can do?
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Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no l...
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Claude Code VS Code extension with backdoor released on Cursor marketplace
Yesterday, Anthropic were compromised and used to stage a global supply chain attack.
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AI, Lean, and the Future of Formal Verification, with Lean Creator Leo de Moura
Leo de Moura on Formal Proofs, AI Agents, and the End of “Trust Me” Code. Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • … More
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Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?
Good developers’ caution about agentic development comes from knowing that built isn’t the same as working in production.
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Forging a Microsoft Edge Full Chain with Logic Bugs Only
This is what I built for Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 — a completely handmade, logic-only Microsoft Edge Full Chain, with no memory corruption, and no AI at all! 🔥
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The case of the 9 bit AES key
Several PDF implementations advertise AES-256, but generate the 256-bit key from either a very small state space, or from insecure random sources.
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Tips for more effective fuzz testing with AFL++
Fuzz testing is incredibly effective for mechanically discovering software defects, yet remains underused and neglected. Pick any program that must gracefully accept complex input, written in any language , which has not yet been been fuzzed, and fuzz testing usually reveals at least one bug. At least one program…
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Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
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Four Months of Zig
It has been about four months since I returned to Zig after being absent for a few years. In this time, I have written some software in Zig and reengaged with the community, online and in person. I decided to share some of that experience, including what I have liked about Zig so far and what I haven't. I'll include…
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A new faster algorithm to compute 64-bit signed floor division
The missing chapter of Hacker's Delight
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Iterating Backwards in C
This is shorter than some of my other posts, but I keep seeing people doing this wrong. It's even worse now in the LLM era.
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A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...