3691
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
3692
Stop Forwarding Errors, Start Designing Them
We develop fast Rust crates and release them fast.
3693
Don’t Outsource the Learning
Right now, it's too easy to let AI write the code while you skip the learning. The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn't move. We are silently trading fu...
3694
Probably check on your smart appliances
TL;DR: is your refrigerator running malware? If so, you better catch it!
3695
Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet
I own a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook, a ChromeOS 2-in-1 ARM64 tablet. I had been running ChromeOS, then postmarketOS, which suddenly broke. Time for some firmware hacking to try and get Ubuntu to run there!
3696
Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle
AI automation and the Four Horsemen of the paper jam.
3697
Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
The important question about AI-assisted programming isn't who writes the code. It's who understands the system.
3698
The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.
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The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the...
3700
Jacobian Conjecture for Baby
An illustrated guide that starts from the basics, explains the Jacobian Conjecture, and follows what happened to it in July 2026.
3701
HTML-only conditional lazy loading (via preload and media)
The accepted practice is to not add lazy-loading to images above the fold, especially the LCP image, since doing so can delay their loading until the browser has determined they are definitely in the viewport. One problem though is that "above the fold" depends on screen size: an image can be above the fold on desktop…
3702
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly
Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software industry interview table. The ZIRP had…
3703
Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
How I got many of my childhood games running again after fighting with old Copy-Protection mechanisms
3704
Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT Following my recent rants about computer generated effects ( here and here ), I thought it would be fun to look i...
3705
Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator
In the previous article we explored how the Go runtime bootstraps itself — how a Go binary goes from the operating system handing it control to your func main() running. During that bootstrap, one of the first things the runtime sets up is the memory allocator. And that’s what we’re going to explore today. Think of…
3706
Analytic Fog Rendering with Volumetric Primitives (2025)
In this post I’m going to cover a neat technique for rendering regions of fog with varying density. I’ll start by covering some of the basic principles behind fog rendering and a few co…
3707
Palantir: Financed by Epstein, Fueled by Thiel
Palantir took Epstein’s money, Thiel’s backing, and Trump’s blessing to build an AI war machine. If Gaza is the testing ground, America’s next. Are we ready to fight back?
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How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)
These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me (bs at cs dot tamu dot edu). Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
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Top Web Design Styles of 1993
It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.
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Contributor Poker and Zig's AI Ban
You should always change doors when playing Monty Hall
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Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability: Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will
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Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
3713
Wolves, sheep, and gypsies
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as…