3001
A new way to think about borrow checking (in reverse)
Have you ever had a weird idea, and then it worked, but you can't really believe it?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,710 posts.
3002
How to build a `Git diff` driver
How to write an external tool for `git diff` to delegate complex diffs to.
3003
How JPEG works: Interactively explore JPEG's lossy compression methods
In the world of technology, “forever” means about 5 years. It’s humbling to think that the 1992 JPEG image standard is still going strong despite being more than 5 “forevers” old. Why has it been so successful? This article presents the key ideas behind JPEG in plain language and includes an interactive JPEG…
3004
The Lost Atomic Update on Loongson CPU
杰哥的{教学，运维，编程，调板子}小笔记
3005
Dude, where's my supersonic jet?
3 innovators reimagining how we fly
3006
People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more
Hard work is grinding and only partly reliable. Luck is random by definition. Research on who you know is far more specific than most networking advice.
3007
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.
3008
The cost YAGNI was never about
If you think YAGNI is about saving effort, cheap generation should retire it. It doesn't. Here's why.
3009
GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
The GDID helped catch a hacker despite his VPN. I set up a VM to see if it can be neutralized: what works, what doesn't, and the scripts to stop it from ...
3010
Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
3011
One item purchased, ten emails
A single online order now generates ten emails. A look at how retail email got this far out of hand.
3012
Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines
The unusually long sentences criminalize being an anti-fascist activist, reading the wrong zines, and using the wrong communication apps. They're incredibly dangerous.
3013
Anatomy of a Lean proof for software engineers
Intro I recently worked through a problem from a theory of computation textbook that asked me to prove a property of a language using finite automata. The informal proof is a simple constructive proof where you build an automaton and show that it recognizes the language. This is kind of similar to program…
3014
Commit description as a thinking tool
Before the AI era, I wrote pretty long commit descriptions (or commit bodies) for major changes. It took me about five to ten minutes to draft and reread them to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I did that for several reasons.
3015
Reasons robotics is hard
And why you should ignore demo videos
3016
NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
Update: I noticed that the post appeared on Hacker News. It got more publicity than I thought it would. But maybe it's a good thing. It shows that there is an increased interest in NetBSD. And I suppose it's in part because people are looking for AI-free alternatives and there aren't many options out there.
3017
Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after…
3018
AI At Home Part 1: A Box Of Scraps
data centers are so cool there should be one in every house
3019
Opaque Types in Python
A proposed technique for exposing an opaque data structure with idiomatic modern Python.
3020
Formalizing CPython
AI agents wrote 613,318 lines of Lean that copy Python's internals, tested every piece against real Python, and turned up 418 bug reports along the way.
3021
Novellas with Groff
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
3022
Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
In the 1970s, floating-point arithmetic was a mess. Computer manufacturers had a dozen incompatible arithmetic standards. Moreover, floating...
3023
Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning
Linux latency on the desktop and in games compared to Windows. Network streaming with Sunshine and Moonlight. Tuning the KWin compositor for lower latencies.
3024
Why is the first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?
Why is my first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?? It’s the ’emergency pool’ for exceptions, here’s how I uncovered it using GDB and digging through the source code of libstdc++, glibc and Valgrind!
3025
Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus
While starting my first year at the Colorado School of Mines, I came across a rather interesting fact: the local DNS servers will assign a subdomain to each device that connects to the network. This means that a device called “meow” will be visible as “meow.mines.edu” on any campus wifi, though the network still…
3026
Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete
Claim: as specified, the UTS #35 transliteration-rule language is Turing-complete. This is an exception in Unicode, where algorithms are deliberately bounded and always terminate. The specification defines a revisiting cursor with no rewrite limit. ICU's implementation implements a per-call cap, but the spec itself…
3027
Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive
I sell fentanyl six days a week under the El at Kensington and Somerset, and every bag I sell is net life-positive. Each bag carries a small but real chance of killing whoever buys it. Each bag also sends $1.80 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which GiveWell estimates saves a child’s life for about $5,500. My…
3028
How I've run major projects (2025)
focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit
3029
I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
3030
Learning Lean: Part 1
Motivation I’ve been captivated by the recent movement to popularize mathematics formalization through the Lean theorem prover, and this year I’m diving deeper into learning it. For those unfamiliar with this revolution, I highly recommend watching Kevin Buzzard’s talks on YouTube for an overview of why formal…