Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
Web developer and cybersecurity researcher
Read this Tcl/Tk hands-up/primer to find out how the open-source Command Tool Language toolkit can help you develop cross-plaform tools for Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android.
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
Join me as I update a project through 10 years of Unity editors. Along the way I will talk about my process, Unity tips and tricks, and the tech changes of Unity Engine - several of which I observed firsthand while working at Unity.
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
A deep dive into Emacs's widget library: what it does well, where it falls apart, and a step-by-step case study of building a table widget with editable cells. Includes working code and hard-won lessons about state management, layout hacks, and cursor position preservation.
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
I’ve been taking photos of benches for years. Sometimes on purpose because I find them intriguing and I have an thing for objects designed for people but without anybody using them, sometimes just because they were there next to my subject. Last year, looking at these photographs, I noticed something I didn’t know…
A step-by-step guide to modern texture memory layout
As my cat woke me up way too early for a Saturday morning, I decided to put all this extra time (and my ChatGPT Pro subscription) into good use and generated a QR-code generator for PostgreSQL, written as a single pure SQL statement. No external libraries or Postgres extension installation needed! The pqr.sql example…
I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go.
In my previous blog post I talked about how I bought a Blu-ray drive and a couple of M-Discs to use it for long-term archival backups.
Modern PC games make you install a ring-0 anti-cheat driver you can't audit.
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built in all the wrong ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software…
My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores.To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there…
On why bitmap fonts still carry more life than most default tech type.
Tailwind is great. It's a quick way to style a webpage and offers incredible flexibility. The problem is, despite Tailwind being incredibly customisable I can instantly tell when a site is using Tailwind. It has a certain look and feel that is hard to shake. A few years ago this "look and feel" was fresh and classy…
A solution to the Epstein problem
What are the true limits to motivation?
Last year I've fixed a bug in Linux kernel OHCI (USB 1.1) stack , which rendered my old printer unreliable: OHCI adds artificial delay of 1ms for each USB transfer of send-read pattern, while my very old, host-based printer expects very tight timings and constant latency, like some kind of CnC machine.
Looking back at the last 12 months feels surreal. I have learned so much about selling, it's insane.
A proof of concept demonstrating how to use the Hinge dating app as a C2.
How four layers of authentication in a production anti-cheat driver still hand you a complete BYOVD toolkit
Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
