Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
My GPU is the integrated Radeon Vega 8 that comes with my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. I tell you this so you know that my workstation is not a graphical computing powerhouse. It is, in fact, quite weak. To its credit my integrated GPU shows up as 48% faster on UserBenchmark than the GPU in my low end hardware target; a…
Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
I've done a lot of activism for software freedom, over the years. At first it was purely for software freedom and related topics, (such as security, autonomy and privacy) but eventually this has evolved into something more holistic. I believe that the software I use should be held to higher ethical standards than only…
This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.
Why the last thing you should spend time on is your own software factory.
...also don't tell lies. But I'm getting ahead of myself already. I keep running into people online who openly say that they use AI to do their writing for t
This is shorter than some of my other posts, but I keep seeing people doing this wrong. It's even worse now in the LLM era.
Crystal is a compiled programming langauge with static type-checking with syntax very similar to the Ruby programming language . Something that keeps Crystal feeling like a dynamically typed language is how a variable can be assigned to multiple types throughout the course of its lifetime, unlike most statically typed…
It started with automating his emails.
One little step toward UNIX
I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced somet…
Something truly monumental happened in the world of software development in 2025. Safari shipped a reasonable implementation of text-wrap: pretty: https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wrap-pretty/. We are getting closer and closer to the cutting-edge XV-century technology. Beautiful paragraphs!
In which I painstakingly remove functionality from a Linux live image. Like a normal person.
Thoughts on technology, life and everything else.
As part of the ZX Spectrum tour, I implemented some routines that would let you play simple tones out of the 1-bit beeper. These were in large part inspired by earlier work I did on the Apple II. W…
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
[This is a guest post by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In January a group of mathematicians, hi…
Ben Gesoff's personal website
Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.
Setting up a website using Elixir and Phoenix, leaning on NimblePublisher for the blog posts.
Root election, port roles, proposals and agreements, topology changes: explore RSTP through simulations powered by MSTPD compiled to WebAssembly.
Editing photos as I press the shutter.
You might find the title a little bit odd. Hold your thought for a moment and hear me out. I'm a big believer that in technology, and life, something that…
The backlash against data centers is difficult to understand if your salary depends on your not understanding it.
For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing novels, I spend my days as a software engineer, writing code. The software industry these days relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Because it has studied trillions of lines of publicly accessible source code, because code solves problems with testable right…
I asked Claude to look up the X-Plane 12 API and try to fly a Cessna from Hainan to somewhere nearby. It kept a pilot's log. Everything below is Claude's own notes from during the flight. I occasionally had to remind it to keep the pilot log running, and had to tell it when it crashed as xplane would quickly restart…
Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A _business_ will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.
