481
Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
482
Do your own writing
When you write a document or essay, you are posing a question and then answering it. For example, a PRD answers the question, “What should we build?” A technical spec answers, “How should we build it?” Sometimes the question is more difficult to answer—“What are we even trying to accomplish?” And with every attempt at…
483
The Cognitive Dark Forest
The open web with AIs is turning into a dark forest.
484
My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day. I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.
485
What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?
EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people. 2/04/2026: added a GitHub repository with data for this post
486
The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
A fabulously gay blind Romance author.
487
French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
A complete explanation of how e, è, é, ê, and ë are used in French, with rules, examples and pronunciation.
488
Personal Encyclopedias
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
489
490
Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
Introducing Hegel, our new family of property-based testing libraries.
491
March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
492
Migrating to the EU
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
493
You are not your job
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
494
Chest Fridge (2009)
Chest fridge Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air. Understanding and cooperating with Nature rather than acting against it leads to much better efficiency. My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only…
495
Ju Ci: The Art of Repairing Porcelain
Ju ci (锔瓷), the Chinese craft of repairing broken porcelain has roots dating back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), with illustrations of craftsmen mending pots appearing in Chinese paintings as earl…
496
Some things just take time
On friction, patience, and planting trees.
497
I quit editing photos
Editing photos as I press the shutter.
498
I'm OK being left behind, thanks
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…
499
Overcoming the friendship recession
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
500
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver, by Carl Etnier.
501
Warranty Void If Regenerated
Tom Hartmann had not planned to become a Software Mechanic.
502
25 Years of Eggs
Two AI agents, 11,345 receipts, and 1.6 billion tokens to find out what I’ve spent on eggs since 2001.
503
LLMs predict my coffee
Why not benchmark with physical experiments?
504
Have a fucking website
For fuck's sake
505
A Decade of Slug
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…
506
Why I love FreeBSD
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.
507
In Memoriam: John W. Addison, my PhD advisor
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go ou…
508
Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project
PRAGUE, 18 February 2026 – A landmark international study across five Central European countries has found hazardous chemicals in every single pair of headphones analysed, from premium models to cheap imports. Authors say the results reveal a systemic failure in consumer safety regulation acros...
509
Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
I think I’ve finally pinpointed why it is that I have an allergic reaction when I’m confronted with a text that has me as the intended recipient, but that has been run through an LLM to change or “clean up” the wording - especially if it’s internal communication or even direct communication. Well, at the very least, I…
510
On a Boat
Media over QUIC: I'm on a boat.