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2025: The Year in LLMs
This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about …
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,219 posts.
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Love your customers
There were many reasons why I left Oracle shortly after it acquired Sun, but first among them: I could not stomach the disdain that Oracle had for its own customers. Sun — for all of its (many!) other faults — loved its customers.
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On privacy and control
I have 15+ years of software engineering experience across different parts of the tech stack including networking libraries, congestion control, performance improvements, Backend, and Android development.
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I canceled my book deal
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
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Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups
If you were an Internet user for a few years on either side of the turn of the millennium, you will remember pop-up advertisements.
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Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris
Training gaming agents is an addictive game. A game of sleepless nights, grinds, explorations, sweeps, and prayers. PufferLib allows anyone with a gaming computer to play the RL game, but getting from “pretty good” to “superhuman” requires tweaking every lever, repeatedly.
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The compiler is your best friend
The compiler is a powerful tool, yet many developers have a painful relationship with it. Can we do better?
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Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame
One framework for creating powerful cross-platform games
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Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
The method is based on a recyclable filtration fluid consisting of a superbase-alcohol compound. One gram of the new compound can absorb 156 milligrams of carbon dioxide.
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When square pixels aren't square
When you want to get the dimensions of a video file, you probably want the display aspect ratio. Using the dimensions of a stored frame may result in a stretched or squashed video.
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A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector
Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers yo…
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The most famous transcendental numbers
The mathematical constant pi represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is the most famous ratio in mathematics both on Earth and probably for any advanced civilization in the universe. The number pi, like other fundamental constants of mathematics such as e = 2.718..., is a…
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The rise of industrial software
> _**Industrial**_ > > _adj. (sense 3a)_ > > Of or relating to productive work, trade, or manufacture, esp.
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Exploring Dithering on Spectra 6-color E-Ink Displays
I have tested the XIAO ePaper DIY Kit (ESP32-S3) – EE04 from Seeed Studio in depth. While its 6-color Spectra 6 display is impressive out of the box, I wanted to see if software could overcome hardware limitations. In this post, I’ll share how I’ve pushed this hardware to its limits by using dithering techniques to…
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Quality of drinking water varies significantly by airline
A 2026 Airline Water Study released today by the Center for Food as Medicine and Longevity reveals that the quality of drinking water varies significantly by airline, and many airlines…
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Attention Is Bayesian Inference
My journey from building cricket bots to building “wind tunnels” with my collaborators — and finding the answer hidden in geometry.
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Project ideas to appreciate the art of programming
Curated list of project ideas for programmers who aren't sure what to build. We chose 73 projects that teach a lot and are fun to build.
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Sabotaging Bitcoin
Source I find myself in the unusual position of defending Bitcoin from its critics, if only reluctantly. In 2024 Soroush Farokhnia & Amir...
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Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo
Frontend, backend, marketing website, documentation, blog content, investor site, Chrome extension, Google Docs add-on,cloud functions, demo repos—all in…
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FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
How a simple idea turned into an international weather service on the Fediverse.
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A faster heart for F-Droid
Donations are a key part of what keeps F-Droid independent and reliable and our latest hardware update is a direct result of your support. Thanks to donation...
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Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems
ETH Zurich researchers have developed a process that can be used on site to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the remediation of contaminated sites and a sustainable circular economy.
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A Vulnerability in Libsodium
Libsodium is now 13 years old!
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What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
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Igniting the GPU: From Kernel Plumbing to 3D Rendering on RISC-V
How I enabled the PowerVR GPU on the TH1520 SoC by writing the missing kernel drivers.
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No strcpy either
Some time ago I mentioned that we went through the curl source code and eventually got rid of all strncpy() calls. strncpy() is a weird function with a crappy API. It might not null terminate the destination and it pads the target buffer with zeroes. Quite frankly, most code bases are probably better off completely ……