5521
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,968 posts.
5522
Video Games as Art
Video games are art, but a strange art: their essence is transformation of the player, not description to the player. This makes meaningful criticism nearly impossible—you can point at the moon, but it’s not the moon, and once someone sees it, they no longer need the pointing.
5523
Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer (2024)
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
5524
Case study: Creative math – How AI fakes proofs
Many AI enthusiasts debate whether Large Language Models actually "reason." My research indicates that a reasoning process does indeed occur, but its goal is different than we assume.
5525
The future of software engineering is SRE
When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
5526
Canada
I've been visiting the US a lot these days: for work, for conferences, and simply to see friends. Commensurately, I've been also thinking more about what Can...
5527
I was right about ATProto key management
Note: this post has been revised to be split into two sections: a description of what happened, and my analysis. I hope to make it clear that, while I do not like ATProto in general, I am trying to make good-faith critcisms of specific design decisions and outcomes, and in fact, this post getting updoots on HackerNews…
5528
First, make me care
Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.
5529
ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data
ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.
5530
Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems
Learn how to use PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) for event-driven systems. Case study from Wayfair showing how to handle failures in Kafka consumers with PostgreSQL.
5531
Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts
Analysis of more than 40 million alarm-related events shows most alarms offer little operational value, disrupt rest and push crews toward risky workarounds.
5532
A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review ) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process :
5533
Sony Data Discman
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
5534
Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes
Who’s this for Basics How data is stored in disk How indexes speedup access to data Costs associated with indexes Disk Space Write operations Query planner Memory usage Types of Indexes Btree Hash BRIN GIN GiST & SP-GiST Conclusion Who’s this for This text is for developers that have an intuitive knowledge of what…
5535
Two Weeks Until Tapeout
Chronicles of a bad idea. Or how I designed a systolic array with in-silicon debug infrastructure from scratch in under two weeks, and taped it out on Global Foundry 180 nm though a Tiny Tapeout experimental shuttle.
5536
5537
We X-Rayed a Suspicious FTDI USB Cable
That cheapo cable you bought online? Probably a counterfeit. We x-rayed a suspicious cable to show you exactly what that means, and why counterfeits work worse and wear out faster.
5538
I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog
How I embedded replies from Bluesky directly on my site.
5539
Postmortem: Our first VLEO satellite mission (with imagery and flight data)
On March 14, 2025, Albedo's first satellite, Clarity-1, launched on SpaceX Transporter-13. We took a big swing with our pathfinder. The mission goals:
5540
Bye Bye Gmail
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed . I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
5541
BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp
We are excited to share that Balsio is the first chat app in Europe that can exchange messages with WhatsApp under the Digital Markets Act. This is a big step forward for anyone using Balsio for work.
5542
Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
5543
December in Servo: multiple windows, proxy support, better caching, and more
Come along and meet us at FOSDEM 2026 – we’re speaking there too!
5544
Memory layout in Zig with formulas
I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…
5545
5546
How I estimate work
There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this: Estimating how long software projects will take is very…
5547
Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
Disclaimer: None of this is written by AI, I’m still a real person writing my own blog like its 1999 I finally figured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my existing phone wires. Powerline adapter…
5548
80386 Multiplication and Division
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
5549
Rust’s Standard Library on the GPU
GPU code can now use Rust's standard library. We share the implementation approach and what this unlocks for GPU programming.
5550
Package management is a wicked problem
Why fixing package managers is harder than it looks.