3901
Help my website is too small
How can it be a real website if it’s less than 7k?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
3902
The Expression Problem and its solutions (2016)
The craft of programming is almost universally concerned with different types of data and operations/algorithms that act on this data [1] . Therefore, it's hardly surprising that designing abstractions for data types and operations has been on the mind of software engineers and programming-language designers since…
3903
Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success
Eleven init systems enter, one init system leaves.
3904
"Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades (2019)
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
3905
Be Worried
Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't publish it 2 years ago.
3906
SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings
SQLite doesn’t do fsync unless specified.
3907
My favourite German word
If creators of documentation are prepared to sacrifice its human purpose in order that LLMs can more effectively slurp it up and regurgitate it on demand, then they have meekly accepted values that more properly belong in a dystopian horror story.
3908
America Has Become a Digital Narco-State
Social media giants have bought our government, and are trying to bully Europe
3909
What I Learned Failing to Finish a Game in 2024
Here’s a breakdown of my year in game dev, the challenges I faced, and the key takeaways that’ll shape my 2025 projects.
3910
Simulated Economy Tutorial
Concept Motivation Imagine an open world RPG where your actions affect the price of goods, the markets reacting to anything the player may do (burn down wheat fields, cost of food increases; kill the merchants, prices differentiate between cities; sell the many swords you’ve collected on your adventures, tank the…
3911
Cancer survival rates are misleading
UPDATE: I submitted a more formal version of this article to the UMAP Journal (Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications), which publishes articles that use mathematical modeling for real-world problems, often with a pedagogical or expository angle. A preprint is available on arXiv at…
3912
Hardware Stockholm Syndrome
2025-10-05
3913
3914
Untrusted chatbot AI between you & the internet is a disaster waiting to happen
JavaScript, math, maps, etc
3915
Hacking Your Own AI Coding Assistant with Claude Pro and MCP
Reverse Engineering Reality
3916
Convolutions, Polynomials and Flipped Kernels
This is a post about multiplying polynomials, convolution sums and the connection between them.
3917
Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)
Hieroglyphs where used for over 3000 years by the Ancient Egyptians. Luckily, they are still studied and researched today, otherwise I couldn't enlist others' help in my crazy follies.
3918
1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)
While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and l…
3919
Questions to ask when you think need to finish something
When a pursuit becomes a drag, here's some questions to help you figure out why, and what to do about it.
3920
Writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C# – Part 1
First part of a series of articles about writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C# using NativeAOT. This part sets the expectations and setups the project, dealing with the first difficulties.
3921
90%
AI is writing 90% of the code I was in charge of
3922
Bad Smart Watch Authentication
IDO based smart watches are a security nightmare, and there's likely millions of them out there
3923
Welcome to hell; please drive carefully
A while back we watched a video on the topic of British road crossings (which I strongly recommend, as well as Chris's shorter video specifically about Zebra crossings ) and since then Tess has been calling out the different crossings by their proper animal names. This explains why, with tickets to a Halloween event…
3924
Towards Interplanetary QUIC Traffic
Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep…
3925
Xbox Hacks: The A20 (2021)
In the early 2000s the Xbox was released. We are nearing the 20 year anniversary so its time to dive into the A20 "hack".
3926
The era of exploration
This post explores the idea that the next breakthroughs in AI may hinge more on how we collect experience through exploration, and less on how many parameters and data points we have.
3927
Guided by the beauty of our test suite
Last summer, I published Raven , an independent implementation of the Uxn CPU and Varavara ordinator . In short, this is a fictional computer designed for cross-platform portability: programs targetting it can be run on any platform that implements the specification.
3928
RoboCop – Breaking the Law. H0ffman Cracks RoboCop Arcade from DataEast
It’s time to take down the future of law enforcement. Following on from my discovery that RoboCop arcade has bootleg protection, see here , I decided it would be fun to crack it. TL;DR –…
3929
We Need to Die
There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing. Something very deep within me just says "no, absolutely not", and I've been trying to figure out why.
3930
That boolean should probably be something else
One of the first types we learn about is the boolean. It's pretty natural to use, because boolean logic underpins much of modern computing. And yet, it's one of the types we should probably be using a lot less of. In almost every single instance when you use a boolean, it should be something else.