3331
AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was
How generative AI exposes the gap between copyright law and everyday enforcement, from fan art and private creation to commercial competition.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
3332
Things I want in a modern relational query language
This was a very old draft I’ve had sitting around for years. The recent discussions of new query languages like Acadia spurred me to revisit, revise, and publish this. I think one of the biggest causes of NoSQL is that… Continue reading →
3333
Agentic AI systems violate the implicit assumptions of database design
There is an implicit contract at the foundation of every database architecture decision you have ever made. You probably never wrote it down. Nobody does. It just… existed.
3334
I Cannot SSH into My Server Anymore (and That's Fine)
To kick off 2026, I had clear objectives in mind: decommissioning my trusty VPS and setting up its successor. Embracing a complete paradigm shift, I built myself a container-centric, declarative, and low-maintenance setup for the years to come.
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3336
It's time to move your docs in the repo
AI agents address the remaining concerns with having your documentation alongside your code in version control
3337
Claude Code and Codex can have real-time conversation via Git
While Claude Code and Codex have significantly accelerated the automation of software development, limitations in the context window of a…
3338
The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.” — Aldous Huxley, Island It was cold out, but none of us were cold. I sat with five men in the mountains of Montana. As the sun set, the fire […]
3339
Writing Rust code that's fast by asking agents to make the code faster
c’mon, try doing a breakthrough
3340
Emacs Is a Lispboard
What would have happened if Emacs' default buffer had been a terminal emulator? Conceptually, from the outside, it would be perceived as a terminal…
3341
Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
3342
Assistant to the Regional Manager
The problem with utopia
3343
PicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts
This is a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts who want to experiment with audio, networking, and expansion on vintage laptops and mobile devices. While ISA users have enjoyed projects like PicoGUS and PicoMEM, PCMCIA users have long been limited to scarce legacy cards with narrow functionality …
3344
Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale at Amazon
The research roots of finding “optimal routing” networks trace back to the late 1970s. Mathematicians defined special kinds of networks called “expanders“. These are graphs with strong connectivity properties guaranteeing no subset of vertices can be isolated from the rest. In 1976, Leslie Valiant gave one of the…
3345
Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
How to move fast when building for the physical world
3346
LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
LLMs make good classifiers but even better features
3347
The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
3348
We can do better than line-buffered output
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
3349
I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet
Since 2020, I've taken on a Steve Jobs alter-ego (on a very, very part time basis, and often for humor purposes ). The firs...
3350
Big-Endian Testing with QEMU
In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.
3351
I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to…
3352
Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.
3353
Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code
I’ve forgotten how to write code, or at least I think I have. Hard to be sure, I haven’t done it for a while. But then, I start to muse…
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3355
Which programming languages are most token-efficient?
Comparing token efficiency across 19 popular programming languages using RosettaCode data - from Clojure to C, there's a 2.6x difference.
3356
The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding
Slop, Alienation, Deskilling, and Team Fallout
3357
How do traffic signals work? (2019)
If you live in a major city, I can take a pretty good guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic. In city driving, the journey is rarely better than the destination. In most cases, we just want to get where we’re going. Traffic is not just frustrating, but it has consequences to the envi
3358
The case for MUDs in modern times (2018)
In the age of smart devices and instant entertainment, can a medium as old as MUDs survive? Driven entirely by text, these Multi-User Dimensions ― or Dungeons,
3359
Fast and Hard Code
People pick languages differently with LLMs.
3360
Go Naming Conventions: A Practical Guide
My new book guides you through the start-to-finish build of a real world web application in Go — covering topics like how to structure your code, manage dependencies, create dynamic database-driven pages, and how to authenticate and authorize users securely .