541
You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings
How to gain access to the contents of privacy-protected folders even though Privacy & Security settings say that access is denied.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,697 posts.
542
The end of Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers group
In 2023 after the ChatGPT release, it was clear to me that research needed to be more organized to succeed than was typical within Microsoft Research . The amount of support and focus which other research groups were applying was great enough that even with a clever idea pursued by one person it was likely to arrive…
543
A Social Filesystem
Formats over apps.
544
How ChatGPT serves ads
OpenAI's ad platform has two halves. On the ChatGPT side, the backend injects structured single_advertiser_ad_unit objects into the conversation SSE stream while the model is responding. On the merchant side, a tracking SDK called OAIQ runs in the visitor's browser and reports product views back
545
Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
546
The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing
The Stringer Bell rule is obsolete, as Trump and state attorneys general let the egg producers off the hook for a brazen conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation.
547
Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
A systems analysis of how AI-assisted development creates a gap between output speed and understanding, and why organizations cannot see it happening.
548
How to setup a local coding agent on macOS
Running Gemma 4 26B-A4B and Qwen3.6 35B-A3B locally with llama.cpp, MTP speculative decoding, multimodal support, and PI as a coding agent.
549
Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes
Short architecture note on Kimi K3, including LatentMoE, Kimi Delta Attention, Attention Residuals, NoPE, multimodality, and inference-efficiency choices.
550
Grieving the loss of details
I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone. All opinions are my own.
551
CSS is DOOMed
Every wall, floor, barrel, and imp is a div — DOOM rendered entirely in CSS. Using 3D transforms, CSS math functions, @property, clip-path, anchor positioning, and SVG filters to build a fully playable 3D first-person shooter in the browser without Canvas or WebGL.
552
Everything in C is undefined behavior
If he had been a programmer, Cardinal Richelieu would have said “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most expert C programmer in the world, and I wi...
553
65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
554
10 years of personal finances in plain text files
I've been tracking my finances using Beancount in plain text files for 10 years. Here are the numbers, the workflow, and why I believe plaintext accounting will outlive any app.
555
Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers
We've all worked with a rockstar developer. They joined the team years ago, full of energy. They had great ideas about new tech, new paradigms, new architectures. Their cutting-edge ideas left everyone else feeling a bit behind and outdated.
556
I love LLMs, I hate hype
I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents. I set up a Linux box with opencode on…
557
Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled
It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexam…
558
The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
An update to Brooks's Law in the age of AI.
559
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task…
560
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How to survive boiling water
A probiotic paradox
562
What shall I teach my son?
Yesterday, the title The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it might be the right book at the right time. It was. Published in 1995, it was surprisingly appropriate balm for the soul of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.
563
How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
breakdown of the architecture behind Linear's speed: local-first sync, MobX observables, instant first loads, and a keyboard-first design.
564
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…
565
Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
[ thank you to claude fable 5.1, holden saberhagen, gabriel kammer, andres erbsen, alice mckean, and tristan wylde-larue for comments on this post ]
566
How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
I think it’s important to be very Canny when someone makes a claim that supports a company’s large valuation.
567
The case for physical media ownership
An overview of physical media ownership, streaming shutdowns, content removals, and the limits of digital licenses.
568
Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
A fun experiment where I back-port all the improvements we've made to chess engines over the last 30 years and run it on a 1996 Pentium Pro to see what we could have done if only we knew more at the time.
569
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in …
570
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You
An atlas of the vibrance of the real world