Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
When measuring the size of a two-dimensional digital picture, the unit pixel is used in a weird overloaded way. Sometimes, it is used as a unit of linear length. For example, each frame of an animation is 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) web standard has px as a unit of length…
This is going to be a long post, but I hope you get value out of it. This wasn’t an easy topic to tackle but it was definitely worthwhile!
Casey Handmer June 2025 Download a printable PDF. NASA was founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik and the emerging necessity of a robust, government supported space exploration and technology devel…
500 years before Polymarket, the Vatican fought to stop gambling on papal affairs. Should we worry that it’s back?
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
Is SQLite durable by default? What settings guarantee durability? The documentation and even comments from its creator give conflicting answers.
Forgotten musings on the economics of AI, an intelligence explosion, and machine consciousness
This page is a mini-site for my Snobol excursion with links to separate pages for my:
<h1 id="a-valid-html-zip-bomb"><a tabindex="0" class="anchor" href="/notes/html_zip_bomb">A valid HTML zip bomb</a></h1><p><img src="/notes/res/zip_bomb_file.svg" alt="Illustration d'une bombe zip" height="150" width="150"> Many sites have been affected by the aggressiveness of web crawlers designed to improve…
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
Deciding not to solve a problem, or solving a different one, can also be a viable solution.
An informal introduction to formality in Lean 4
The DMCA online safe harbor is a notice-and-takedown scheme. Web hosts aren’t liable for copyright-infringing third-party uploads unless and until the copyright owner submits a proper takedown notice to the host, at which point the web host can remain legally...
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
A Date in JavaScript always represents a point in time (i.e. milliseconds since epoch). This is more apparent when printing out the full date string:
(Previous post in the series was on Jai and can be found here)
For the past few years, cheats have evolved rapidly. First came memory reading aimbots, then colorbots, and now AI aim assist. Cheats have escaped the host PC. How does it affect the players and anti-cheats?
Demand consolidation, changing compute mix, custom silicon, and distributed training will hurt NVIDIA's pole position.
I replaced my ChatGPT personalization settings with this prompt a few weeks ago and promptly forgot about it: Be extraordinarily skeptical of your own…
Although counter-intuitive, it can be beneficial to build silos and decrease collaboration between teams. Balance the need for collaboration, coordination, and communication with these tips.
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
From ChatGPT Plugins to Agent Skills, a look at how we've been trying (and failing) to extend LLMs for the last three years.
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation at the Agile Cambridge conference in England on October 2nd, 2025. The topic was “The Accountability Problem.” How do we define software department accountability so our business partners don’t do it for us?
Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.
Welcome to Waqas' blog
Miss the obvious, lose your republic
Over the course of years, RSA implementations gradually replaced Euler's totient function with Carmichael's totient function.
