631
So Much Blood
but how much exactly?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
632
Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
Poking around in Android the other day I found this nugget in Carrier Config manager ; a flag (KEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL) to always report the signal strength to the user as one bar higher than it really is.
633
Don't use cosine similarity carelessly
Cosine similarity - the duct tape of AI. Convenient but often misused. Let's find out how to use it better.
634
Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
635
Smartphones and being present
Living intentionally in a world of distraction.
636
Root for your friends
Heads‑up: The concept of this post might seem trivial, but it can improve your career, happiness, and the people you care about. Proceed without caution. It only takes about 10 minutes to read.
637
%CPU utilization is a lie
I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization, and whichever one is the highest tells you how close…
638
Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)
In this post I go through the journey of overusing Kubernetes and how systemd can actually do most of what I use it for.
639
The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need
When my son was born last April, I had ambitious learning plans for the upcoming 5w paternity leave. As you can imagine, with two kids, life quickly verified this plan 🙃. I did eventually start some projects. One of the goals (sounding rebellious in the current AI hype cycle) was to learn and use neovim for coding. As…
640
The death of partying in the USA
Young Americans today spend 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why?
641
A Love Letter to FreeBSD
I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are…
642
Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.
643
Open Source is one person
The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re…
644
Milk Kanban
We ten to consider Kanban as (digital) whiteboards with columns and sticky notes, while its original meaning was just (any) visual signal.
645
Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
Learn how to clone PostgreSQL databases instantly using reflinks. Turn slow template copies into milliseconds with PostgreSQL 18's new file copy options.
646
Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price
A few months ago, I upgraded my M4 Mac mini from 1 to 2 TB of internal storage, using a then-$269 DIY upgrade kit from ExpandMacMini. At the time, there was no option for upgrading the M4 Pro Mac mini, despite it also using a user-replaceable, socketed storage drive. But the folks at M4-SSD reached out and asked if…
647
Zig builds are getting faster
Andrew Kelley famously (or infamously, depending on your views) said "the compiler is too damn slow, that's why we have bugs." 1
648
A leap year check in three instructions
How to test for leap years (until year 102499) in the proleptic Gregorian calendar with just three 32-bit instructions, with detailed explanation of the bit-level tricks.
649
Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why
Preamble: The whole affair is Google’s fault and not Bear Blog’s. Huge thanks to Herman—Bear Blog’s founder and dev—for his patience and help. A month afte...
650
Vanishing from Hyundai’s data network
Finding and disabling the cellular modem for BlueLink in the Kona EV
651
I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave
Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to:
652
The past was not that cute
Aesthetics are not history.
653
Don't push AI down our throats
AI is being done wrong.
654
Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
Update 2024-01-12 : Ken Shirriff has an an excellent blog post on why “cargo cult” is a poor term of art.
655
TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term
I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.
656
BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of
I came to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show this year with my Dad to learn more about time in broadcast and live production. I was expecting to learn more about grandmaster clocks, AV sync, timing in protocols like Dante, Livewire, AES67, and more—and I have. But then on the first day here I found…
657
My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup
I gave a talk on Wednesday at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup about prompt injection, the lethal trifecta and the challenges of securing systems that use MCP. It wasn’t …
658
Everything I know about good API design
Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of time…
659
Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates
In addition to the VGA donut , I submitted two other entries in the Tiny Tapeout 8 demo competition , where you submit a "tiny" ASIC design (room for about 4000 logic gates) that outputs 2-bit RGB to a VGA port and 1-bit audio to a speaker. One was a an old school C64/Amiga intro type of thing, and the other was a…
660
The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I’ve been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread …