3601
Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?
Good developers’ caution about agentic development comes from knowing that built isn’t the same as working in production.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
3602
Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
3603
Rendezvous with Rama
Some musings on the novel "Rendezvous with Rama".
3604
The Future Belongs to the Weird
the gospel for those out of distribution
3605
Optimizing a lock-free ring buffer
A single-producer single-consumer (SPSC) queue is a great example of how far constraints can take a design. In this post, you will learn how to implement a ring …
3606
Efficient algorithms, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and losing the plot
On efficient algorithms, the exponential time hypothesis, and losing the plot.
3607
Are we self-sovereign PKI yet?
Every end-to-end encrypted messenger ships a fingerprint UI. Almost nobody opens it. A note on what's actually missing.
3608
Lunar Terminator Paradox
There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox:
3609
You need a webring
Yes you! You need a webring
3610
I love email (2023)
I constantly hear about how much everybody hates email. Look, I receive just as many spam messages and useless email-based notifications and stuffy vapid “regarding my previous email” work messages as the next gal. I get it. But I’ve found there’s something magical about email as a medium of communication, and as a…
3611
Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep?
This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu. It is widely known that people don’t remember the first 1-3 years of their childhood, only have episodic memory at 3-6 years old, and only after those first 5-6 years we start to form autobiographical memories. So…
3612
Efficient C++ Programming for Modern 64-bit CPUs: Chapter 4/part 2
The cost of thread context switch, including cache invalidation, can reach up to 3 million CPU cycles RTTI can be quite expensive, with dynamic_cast being up...
3613
Redefining Go Functions
I once wrote a Perl subroutine that would memoize the subroutine that called it. That much was useful, but then it inserted a copy of itself into the caller, so that its callers would be memoized too. A well-placed call to aggressively_memoize could back-propagate to the whole codebase, spreading functional purity…
3614
Making a vintage LLM from scratch
In this blog post, I will share the adventures I had creating my own LLM, from (almost) scratch, trained only on old texts. I made my own base-training and fine-tuning scripts, data processing pipelines and custom datasets. ("almost from scratch" means I did use existing programming languages and libraries, I didn't…
3615
An NSFW filter for Marginalia search
… optional, that is. I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers. The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach. We’ll land on a single…
3616
Six Characters
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
3617
The paddle wheel aircraft carriers of Lake Michigan
You’ve read the title. Aircraft carriers of where powered by what? I was just as surprised as you are, but yes, they really did exist. I now introduce you to USS Wolverine and USS Sable:
3618
Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
In the summer of 1994 Naughty Dog, Inc. was still a two-man company, myself and my longtime partner Jason Rubin. Over the preceding eight years, we had published six games as a lean and mean duo, b…
3619
We don't know why Malawi is poor
And that’s a problem for economic development
3620
AI changes the economics of software rewrites
AI changes rewrite economics because codebases with clear, common patterns get more leverage than proprietary or inconsistent systems.
3621
What does it mean to “write like you talk”?
Subordinate clauses, phrasal modifications, and metadiscourse
3622
Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2
A blog about software craft and quality
3623
Open Source as We Know It Is Dead
I've been part of open source for most of my life. This year, the projects I love started closing their doors to outside contributors, and I don't blame them one bit, but it makes me sad. A personal look at how AI is changing open source as I've known it.
3624
What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic
3625
Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years
My thoughts on why enterprise knowledge systems have failed for sixty years, and what might finally replace them. A couple of weeks ago I demoed one part of what I have been building to a senior exec at a global enterprise - someone who had been asked to lead and guide
3626
Using GCC's Nested Functions with Wide Pointers and No Trampolines II
When the address of a nested function is taken, GCC creates at trampoline at run-time. This trampoline is placed on the stack, which means that the stack has to be executable. This is problematic because a non-executable stack is an important security feature. For some time now, GCC has the option to place the…
3627
Regular expressions that work “everywhere”
What regular expression features work everywhere. Very few unless you relax your definition of "everywhere."
3628
The Potomac River Midair Collision
How America’s golden age of aviation safety came to an end
3629
How to install and start using LineageOS on your phone
Android is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. I is probably also one of the most versatile, used on PCs, phones, cars, autonomous devices such as drones, fridges, and many more.
3630
Recover Apple Keychain
Yes, I do—and probably more than I should admit. But a few things led to this situation. For one, I’d gotten too used to relying on Touch ID. As a result, if my muscle memory failed me, I was stuck. On top of that, I kept entering my office Active Directory (AD) password instead of my Mac password—again, muscle memory…