3091
The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 808...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,710 posts.
3092
Two studies in compiler optimisations
A deep dive into the intricacies of the LLVM optimisation pipeline.
3093
Pushing and Pulling: Three reactivity algorithms
It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them. I want to look at three ways of building reactive engines: push reactivity, pull reactivity, and the hybrid push/pull combination that is used in a bunch of web frameworks…
3094
Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML
Converting Org to HTML with (ice-9 peg) in Guile: OrgWebAlchemy
3095
The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything
I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.
3096
The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
3097
Rathbun's Operator
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
3098
Anger, Anxiety and Agency
Who is the AI villain we should be angry at?
3099
When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
Anthropic spends 2.3x payroll on compute. Top software firms spend 0.4x. Three scenarios for where the rest of the market lands by 2029.
3100
From Rust to Ruby
Who does things like that?!? Apparently: me. I have my own project, written in Rust. Not a big one, mind you, maybe approx. 30k lines of code in total. Rust is verbose so it’s not really that impressive. I’ve put it aside for some time and was toying with local inference, LLMs, writing agents and my attention was…
3101
Will I ever own a zettaflop?
As the eleventh hour dawns all the pieces start to fall into place. I lived my life knowing this would happen, yet when it is I may be just as unprepared as anyone else. As any self driving car maker knows, predicting doesn’t mean you can act.
3102
Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
Link to: https://x.com/markgurman/status/2067741507273289766
3103
Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
If you do Linux systems programming, you will have likely pored over man pages, either on the command line or, my personal preference, using the excellent man7.org or linux.die.net. I’ve always seen …
3104
NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022)
An exercise in spotting agenda journalism: dissecting a 2022 𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑌𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 article on teen vaping sentence by sentence to show how it pins an EVALI hospitalization on legal nicotine vapes while never quite saying so—since the actual cause was illegal THC products. Every misleading sentence is technically true.
3105
3106
Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code
Parsing a statistics textbook with Deepseek OCR on Modal
3107
War Crimes Seem to Be Official US Policy Now
We Will Rue The Day
3108
The U.S. Census Bureau and "Super Intelligence"
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in …
3109
Local Indexing to reduce tool calling and token usage
Pensieve for developers: a local MCP server that gives Claude Code, Codex and Cursor your context. A thread for every piece of work. Free and open source, for Mac.
3110
Automating Immersive Reading
How Storyteller’s forced alignment algorithm works.
3111
Gzip decompression in 250 lines of Rust
i wanted to have a deeper grasp of how compression works, so i wrote a gzip decompressor from scratch. the result is about 250 lines of rust that can decompress gzip from a file or stdin.
3112
The Everdeck: A Universal Card System (2019)
many traditional and modern card games. At only 120 cards, it supports a large number of existing game systems, such as: The Everdeck is a card game system that can be adapted to play many traditio…
3113
Listen to Understand
You can captivate someone not by what you say, but by how you listen.
3114
"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything"
A blog about software craft and quality
3115
I Accidentally Started a Small Business Three Weeks Ago
My Happiest, Most Grounded Distraction
3116
All 23-Bit Still Lifes Are Glider Constructible
In the Game of Life, which still lifes can be produced by crashing gliders together? We’ve known for a few years that the answer cannot be “all of them”, because in 2022 Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo found a patch of still life that, if it exists in the universe, must have existed since the beginning of time. And so…
3117
Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
Look, I really didn’t want to like Duet. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and it annoys me when they do things better than the competition. But they have done it again.
3118
Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Every productivity wave since the PC made work faster and piled on more of it, so companies gained more than workers did. AI does the work itself, which is why this one could land differently.
3119
C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
3120
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Confessions of a naive hamster: why the smartest people in the room keep missing that intelligence is often not the main bottleneck in the real world