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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
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A decade of dotfiles
Reflections on a decade of configuration files.
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I don’t believe in sprints
Sorry, I have opinions again.
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Chief scientist of major corporation can’t handle criticism of the work he hypes
A correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous points us to this article in Technology Review , “Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online. Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense.” Here’s the story:
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Unbundling Tools for Thought
Disparate thoughts on personal information management after traversing the hype cycle.
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Some mistakes Rust doesn't catch
I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do. Ultimately, what you can with a programming l...
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Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a… Continue reading →
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The 5% Rule
...I learned a lot from that period, but one of the things I learned that I did not expect was what I now call my '5% rule.' No matter how kind, warm, thoughtful, amazing, cheerful, consistent, and perfect I treated people roughly 5% of them would just be terrible (yes, I have the numbers to back this)...
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Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s…
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What made the NES so interesting?
I often like to cover oddities here; details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interestin...
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Linux Desktop Environments System Usage
Over the years I've seen a lot of poorly made comparisons of Linux Desktop Environments in terms of system usage and in this article I want to make things right once and for all.
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Famous HNers and their sites
Update: Here’s the link to the HN discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291993
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Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QEMU (Part I)
My personal website.
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I won an award from the FSF for my contributions to Emacs
In this video I thank the Free Software Foundation for the award and stress the importance of the community.
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Why software engineers like woodworking
The smell of fresh pine sawdust filled the air, with more floating up as I sanded the last rough corner of the stool. My toddler was happily sanding her own block off to the side.
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It looks like you’re trying to take over the world
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
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Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform
Just over two years ago I left a role at a London based startup where I lead development of a large, React based e-commerce frontend to join Google to work on Chrome DevTools. My initial focus was to introduce Web Components as the new fundamental building block of all new DevTools features and UI. With the recently…
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The bait-and-switch hidden in today’s cookie announcement
T oday is going to be the day that you read a lot about the UK’s intention to kill cookie pop-ups as part of its post-Brexit Data Reform Bill. By now you should have somehow realised that there’s a bit more to it than that, and that your work is not set to get any easier.
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From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server
Why I uninstalled Plex Media Server after over a decade and migrated my movie and TV show collection to Jellyfin instead of Emby.
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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
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Interview questions to ask your interviewer
An interview should be a two-way street. Here are some questions you can ask the company during a software engineering interview.
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Cognitive loads in programming
This long post presents programming in a different light than what is commonly considered. We will look at cognitive aspects of interacting with code.
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Apple has a bug in its disk I/O throttling code that affects raw disk copies
Matt Jacobson, recovering software engineer.
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What to blog about
You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul! But what should you write about? It’s easy to get hung up …
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Seven sins of numerical linear algebra
In numerical linear algebra we are concerned with solving linear algebra problems accurately and efficiently and understanding the sensitivity of the problems to perturbations. We describe seven si…