The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,800 posts.
In this article, I try to understand why coding agents can be infuriating to use. I think the problem is their conversational UX: they behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don't learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repeated mistakes feel…
A sad look at the state of modern programming books.
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs,…
A visual explanation of how threshold secret sharing lets any k of n shares recover a secret.
Microsoft Copilot Cowork is vulnerable to file exfiltration attacks via indirect prompt injection as a result of insecure automatic action approvals for sending Emails and Teams messages.
A blog about software craft and quality
How close to zero can you get on a 100% EU infrastructure stack? A bootstrapper-friendly setup for under €10 a month.
Someone recently introduced me a weird and wonderful little board game that has become my latest obsession. It's a game for 2-12 players where horses race...
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he's fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about…
Simplified Android Development
IBM's CHIPS Act Investment of $2 billion establishes Anderon, America's first pure-play quantum chip foundry as part of investments in nine companies.
C array types are weird. In this article I’ll explain what I find weird about them, what I’d do differently, and ramble on a few related things.
Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian's project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete . Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of…
The website of Ike Saunders
Out of all the migrations I help teams with, Go to Rust is a bit of an outlier. It’s not a question of “is Rust faster?” or “does Rust have types?”, Go already gets you most of the way there. The discussion is mostly about correctness guarantees, run…
Somewhere between 'ask Claude for a quick opinion' and 'Claude is writing our Jira tickets,' we lost the plot. AI agents are brilliant implementers. They're also confidently wrong about every decision that matters. And when it all falls over, they won't be the ones carrying the bag.
Learnings from post-AI Open Source and how we’re approaching this so far.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) accounts for 63% of AI chip component costs, up from 52% in Q1 2024. Epoch AI's breakdown of component cost shifts across major chip designers.
The following pictures show $n$ unit squares packed inside the smallest known square (of side length $s$). If a pictured packing has multiple numbers in its label above, the picture represents the largest; each smaller is represented by removing any square. For the $n ≤ 324$ not pictured, the trivial packing (with no…
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
