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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,192 posts.
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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>
Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an…
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Nvidia GPUs can break Chrome's incognito mode
When I launched Diablo III, I didn’t expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that’s exactly what replaced the black loading scree…
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Zsh and Fish’s simple but clever trick for highlighting missing linefeeds
tl;dr: We look at how Zsh and Fish is able to indicate a missing terminating linefeed in program output when the Unix programming model precludes examining the output itself.
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What does randomness look like?
On 13 June 1944, a week after the allied invasion of Normandy, a loud buzzing sound rattled through the skies of battle-worn London. The source of the sound was a newly developed German instrument …
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Beyond self-attention: How a small language model predicts the next token
A deep dive into the internals of a small transformer model to learn how it turns self-attention calculations into accurate predictions for the next token.
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Neural Networks as Ordinary Differential Equations
Recently I found a paper being presented at NeurIPS this year, entitled Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, written by Ricky Chen, Yulia Rubanova, Jesse Bettencourt, and David Duvenaud from the University of Toronto. The core idea is that certain types of neural networks are analogous to a discretized differential…
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I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf
I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf in 2025, my first 'new' car in 15 years. The above photo was taken by the dealership; apparently their social media team likes to post photos of all purchasers. I test drove a Tesla in 2012, and quickly realized my mistake. No gasoline-powered car (outside of supercars, maybe? Never…
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Crypto is an unproductive bubble
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here.Another update: Scott Alexander just (12/8/22) wrote the best counterpoint to this that I’ve read – see it here “The four most expensive words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” John Templeton I’m writing this essay not so much to…
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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity
I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post
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Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software
Activision’s blind faith in the infallibility of their RICOCHET anti-cheat software , combined with a buggy and unstable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II release, has resulted in faulty, permanent, and unappealable player account bans that prevent users from starting even the single-player game. These bans leave…
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Telegram Desktop vulnerability allowed any user's file to be stolen
An unescaped separator in Telegram Desktop’s single-instance IPC lets one clicked link read arbitrary files off the disk and send them to the attacker, session files included.
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A History of IDEs at Google
Laurent Le Brun's blog
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Leaving LinkedIn
What if your dedication to doing things right clashed with your company's fast pace? Chris Krycho faced this very question at LinkedIn. His journey was marked by challenges: from the nuances of remote work to the struggle of influencing company culture, and a critical incident that put his principles to the test…
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How to get better at guitar
Years ago, I watched a video where guitar teacher Justin Sandercoe explained a way to get better at guitar. It has changed my playing, and it might change yours, too. This isn’t my idea; it’s Justin’s. You should watch his video and visit his website. Why am I writing about it, then? Because I think it’s an invaluable…
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How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
Within two emails, a merchant went from blatant dismissal to full payment, and I owe it to The Organized Professional Method.
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Rust: Enable WebAssembly backend by default
Yesterday the Pull Request 46115: "rustbuild: Enable WebAssembly backend by default" was merged into Rust master. With the Nightly build from that night, the wasm32-unknown-unknown target is natively available.
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Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography
Surprisingly (to me) Claude Code debugged my new ML-DSA implementation faster than I would have, finding the non-obvious low-level issue that was making Verify fail.
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Make Linux look like Windows 95
Blasphemy? Probably! But still pretty awesome!
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Understanding Reasoning LLMs
Methods and Strategies for Building and Refining Reasoning Models
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Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing
I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak , and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun.
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Rules for Autocomplete
Autocompleting text with known values seems like an easy problem to solve, but so so so many UIs get it wrong. I see this frequently enough that, rather than complain about them individually, I though I’d just write down the set of rules they often break.
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How a 64k intro is made
The demoscene is about producing cool real time works (as in “runs on your computer”) called demos . Some demos are really small, say 64 kilobytes or less, and these are called intros . The name comes from “crack intros”. So an intro is just a demo that’s small.
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HyperDev – Developer Playground for Full-Stack Web Apps
One more thing… It’s been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that’s doing pretty well). Today we’re announcing the public beta of Hyper…