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I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
JD Stillwater, Science Ambassador's blog.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
272
Markov chains are funnier than LLMs
Predictability machines and personality
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Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason
tl;dr: high_impact is small game engine for 2D action games. It's written in C, compiles to Windows, Mac and Linux as well as to WASM for the Web. It's “inspired by” my original Impact JavaScript game engine from 2010. The name high_impact is a nod to a time when C was considered a high level language.
274
OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now
(“make LLMs play better with one weird trick”)
275
They stole my voice with AI
UPDATE 9/23: The CEO of Elecrow responded. I've posted a follow-up blog post with my reaction to the response and some other thoughts on AI voice cloning. Listen to this clip: Your browser does not support the video tag. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty familiar. I mean I would like you to subscribe to…
276
ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired . You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name.
277
I just wanted Emacs to look nice – Using 24-bit color in terminals
Thanks to some coworkers and David Wilson’s Emacs from Scratch playlist, I’ve been getting back into Emacs. The community is more vibrant than the last time I looked, and LSP brings modern completion and inline type checking.
278
Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot
Wireless and firmware hacking, PhD life, Technology
279
Fuzzing Ladybird with tools from Google Project Zero
While Ladybird does an okay job with well-formed web content, I thought it would be useful to throw some security research tools at it and see what kind of issues it might reveal.
280
The Engineering of Landfills
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Puente Hills Landfill outside of Los Angeles, California. The first truckload of trash was dumped here in 1957, and the trucks just kept coming. For more than five decades, if you threw something away in LA County, t
281
How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?
I use a hardware latency tester to measure how much the VTE-based terminals improved from GNOME 45 to GNOME 46.
282
No Salt
This is by my brother, Sam. I arrived to Arizona late Saturday, after learning that my brother has only a few days left before cancer ends him. Jake’s wife, Bess, confessed that she had neither the…
283
Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
284
I looked through attacks in my access logs
I've been self-hosting for over a decade. It's freeing because I own my data, and do not depend on any platform other than my cloud host, which I can easily switch off. Self-hosting gives much insight into what it takes to run a cloud service. Anyone
285
The C23 edition of Modern C
The C23 edition of Modern C is now available for free download from And as before a dedicated page for the book may be found at where you also may find a link to download the code examples that com…
286
93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
287
Is the world really running out of sand?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you have to know the answer right away, it’s no; or at least, my goal with this video is to convince you that the world is not running out of sand. But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be here (right?) and you probably woul
288
Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens
[custom_views_and_hn_comments hn_id=”40015185″] My startup Truss (gettruss.io) released a few LLM-heavy features in the last six months, and the narrative around LLMs that I read on Hacker News is now starting to diverge from my reality, so I thought I’d share some of the more “surprising” lessons after churning…
289
The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
I want to tell the story of a beautiful phenomenon in biology. In some sense it’s the prototype of much of the activity of life. The phenomenon is the way in which an individual cell of E. coli forages for nutrients. This process, known as “chemotaxis”—the “chemo-” for chemical and the “taxis” from the Greek τάξις…
290
I accidentally Blender VSE
A bit over two months ago I started to contribute a bit of code to Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (VSE). Did you know that Blender has a suite of video editing tools? Yeah, me neither :) Even the feature page for it on the website looks… a bit empty lol.
291
Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi
Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several classes of things can go wrong, and you need to consider how your Pi will recover from each of them.
292
Fixing an Elgato HD60 S HDMI capture device with the help of Ghidra
This post has a little bit of everything. Hardware diagnostics, some suspiciously similar datasheets from two separate Taiwan chip manufacturers, and firmware reverse engineering. Read on if that sounds like fun!
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The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day
This was several years back. Keep in mind that early in my career, my father had told me that doing a good job often meant doing what needed to be done in spite of your boss. And by that he meant that you can either make your boss successful and happy or you can run every decision by your boss. In which case no one is…
296
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
297
Bollards: Why and What
Naming something we see and benefit from every day
298
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
299
The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
300
How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.