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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,204 posts.
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Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
We know, "no idea is a bad idea," but brainstorming is often unsuccessful. These prompts actually work. They could even lead to a unique business model.
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Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
This entry focuses on Wube Software's long-running Factorio Friday Facts; a seven-year labor of love documenting the creation of the titular video game.
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Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS
Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved to meet the needs…
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Law Students Fend Off a Patent Troll
A handful of Brooklyn Law students forced a patent troll to drop a meritless lawsuit.
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Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI
A non-artsy primer in digital aesthetics
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Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission
At this point we have a TCP/IP stack that is able to communicate to other hosts in the Internet. The implementation so far has been fairly straight-forward, but missing a major feature: Reliability. Namely, our TCP does not guarantee the integrity of the data stream it presents to applications. Even establishing the…
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Flatpak Is Not the Future
Deploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux…
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Writing code is cheap now
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
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Free software hasn't won
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form.
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An X11 apologist tries Wayland
I think it’s only fair to call me an X apologist. I get incredibly frustrated when people talk about dropping support for X11. I fight back against the notion that some day X11 will be dead and unmaintained, a curiosity of a time before. I’ve spoken to people in my circles at-length about the accessibility tools that…
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I changed my mind about nuclear waste
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
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Apple gave me the Hey treatment back in 2014
I’ve been reading the news this week about Hey, Apple, and in app purchases. Many people have offered their takes on the situation, and I can’t help but feel déjà vu.
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Why is AI so useless for business?
AI research has structural problems that limit how much it can impact business. But understanding why gives a way to determine what will work and what won't, as well as reveal new business opportunities.
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How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
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On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted
A blog about software craft and quality
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Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
I would like to thank Microsoft product teams and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) for collaborating with me on this technical analysis and mitigation of the disclosed vulnerabilities. The editorial opinions reflected below are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations I…
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OCaml as my primary language
A detailed explanation of why I chose OCaml as the ‘default’ programming language for every project.
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Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
I'm making over $800 per month with my music— almost exclusively through Spotify. This is up from $400 per month last year. I don't tour, I don't sell merch and I'm not on a major label. I'm just a small indie artist making music in my evenings— and Spotify is making that possible.
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Text editing hates you too (2019)
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
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Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget
As everyone is well aware, the world is still going nuts trying to develop more, newer and better AI tools. Mostly by throwing absurd amounts of money at the problem. Many of those billions go towards building cheap or free services that operate at a significant loss. The tech giants that run them all are hoping to…
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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers actually want
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Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?
One paper that caught my attention a bit ago was Selective attention in hypothesis-driven data analysis by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher. In their study, students who were given specific hypotheses to test were much less likely to notice an obvious “gorilla in the data” compared to students who explored the data…
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Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me
For decades, I have been talking about the importance of individual privacy. For almost as long, I have been using the metaphor of digital feudalism to describe how large companies have become central control points for our data. And for maybe half a decade, I have been talking about the world-sized robot that is the…
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Declining America
Recently I got an invitation from an organization I respect, to a gathering of senior people, unconference format. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it doesn’t reek of boosterism. My guess is that the discussions would be relatively intelligent and unbeliever contributions would be welcome. I declined, because it’s in…
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I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral
Hacker Experience is an online hacking simulation game. Read more about it here.