Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,201 posts.
Lessons from my first exit
My takeaways from selling TinyPilot
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Startups Are Hard
Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, "I'm a founder!" Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it's just that the investors don't have as much leverage as they used to, but they still…
Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
A Facebook Sixth Sense
I use Facebook every day — probably too much for my own good — and I’ve always been tempted to dive into their internals. That is, the…
My Emacs Lisp book is finished
I am very proud to say that after about 10 months of work I finished writing my Emacs Lisp book . If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s called “Hacking your way around in Emacs” and it is an intermediate-level textbook on Emacs Lisp, showing a lot of useful things on about 100 pages.
A visual book recommender
Recreating the used bookstore experience via contrastive learning, t-SNE, and 100M book reviews.
Visual introduction to PyTorch
An easy to follow, visual introduction to PyTorch.
The Mathocalypse
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…
The ten year anniversary of the Healthcare.gov rescue
Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian...
Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020)
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
Java in the Small
Java has many features that make it well suited for large, long-lasting projects. But I find it surprisingly good for small tasks as well. Recent language features make it even better. The killer features are compile-time typing and great tool support.
Where do the children play?
On the need for a world without us
Don't "optimize" conditional moves in shaders with mix()+step()
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Kill Your Dependencies
This post talks about Ruby but it’s true of every language community: Python, JavaScript, Java, etc. The scourge of dependencies spares no one. This is a dependency visualization of every Rails app I’ve ever used. Does any of this sound familiar: Gemfile with 100s of entries. Test gems loading in production. Each…
The Art of Money Getting
P.T. Barnum was 70 years old when he turned his most popular lecture into this book in 1880. By then, he’d already built America’s most famous museum in New York, introduced General Tom Thumb to audiences, served as mayor of Bridgeport, gone broke from a disastrous investment in a Connecticut clock company, and clawed…
The Last Message Sent on AIM
In the early 2000s social media sites like Facebook and Twitter weren’t commonplace yet. Even text messages, at ten cents each, were something to be rationed. For many teenagers the primary means of communication outside school was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). So when it was announced in October that they were…
The Math Is Haunted
A taste of Lean.
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
Without permission, a marketing agency republished the entirety of John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows book, replacing its art with AI slop and adding new AI words. Their unauthorized site now ranks higher than the real one everywhere.
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
For more information on the context behind this talk, see An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" .
Winning at Candy Crush
I find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “ winning at Puzzle Adventures ”, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores with no effort.
Monospace: A JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the demo competition
MONOSPACE: Flip dots with feelings, a JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the 1024 bytes demo competition at Assembly 2020.