Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,194 posts.
Nov 27, 2023: Much has changed since this article was published. I've become far more involved with ZC development; the name of the program is now ZQuest Classic; our website is zquestclassic.com ; and the web version discussed in this article is now hosted at web.zquestclassic.com
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't…
If you attempt this project, your classmates will think you're a nerd. You'll likely wind up getting your head flushed and/or balls greased.
We’ve documented more than 450 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog
The Making of RP2040 Doom
The git bomb. Crafting compact repos that can't be cloned.
This article summarizes some lower level aspect of how GPU executes. Although GPU programming is not that complicated when compared to CPU, it also doesn’t match to what hardware is doing exactly. The reason is that we can’t just program GPU without some API, which is an abstraction over its inner workings. Since few…
The definitive guide to Random Forests and Decision Trees.
Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think. It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this […]
The story is personal, but I hope readers find something they can relate to in their own life stream.
Why I love NixOS is really about the Nix package manager, reproducibility, and sane system management in the LLM coding era.
For the past three years, Dan Pashman of The Sporkful podcast has been on something of a mission: to invent a new pasta shape. All of Pashman’s hard work has pa
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
While not yet at version 1.0, Zig is about to reach a new level of maturity and stability.
I wrote up my experience building a backyard office because I wish I had come across more articles like this when planning my build. I hope this post helps you
This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini. They’re in my workflow like everyone else’s. But the tradecraft is slipping. Analysts are skipping the hard parts. They’re trusting GenAI to do the heavy cognitive lifting, and it’s changing how we operate at a foundational level.
Some might remember a book I released in 2016, “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”. A lot has changed in the world since then, and Shenzhen is no exception.
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a...
A summary of the best ideas from Atomic Habits by James Clear
Announcing a $12,288 bounty (tripled to charity) for cracking the five seeds selected by the NSA in the '90s for the NIST elliptic curve standard.
Divide the number 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,998,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 into 1 and express the result as a decimal expansion, and you’ll find the Fibonacci sequence presented in tidy 24-digit strings: (Thanks, David.)
After assembling over 200 Telephreak badges by hand for DEFCON 26 (and taking *way* longer to accomplish it than I estimated) I figured I should document some of the lessons that I learned along the way – from initial design to finished product. The subject of many of the examples of the right way to […]
