871
The subtle art of designing physical controls for cars
Prototyping a concept for simpler, physical climate controls
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
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873
Making any integer with four 2s
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
874
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
I reverse-engineered Waffle House's website to build a live version of the (unofficial) Waffle House Index, and got a cease and desist for it.
875
Language models pack billions of concepts into 12k dimensions
In a recent 3Blue1Brown video series on transformer models, Grant Sanderson posed a fascinating question: How can a relatively modest embedding space of 12,288 dimensions (GPT-3) accommodate millions of distinct real-world concepts? The answer lies at the intersection of high-dimensional geometry and a remarkable…
876
Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
877
AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected
I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.
878
Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git
Part 7 of my software journey, getting to know developer experience.
879
This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5 (2024)
An absolute mammoth post about how I am running this blog site from a Google Pixel 5 Android phone using only Termux. It includes what inspired me, what I'm using for the setup, and my longform notes on the entire project.
880
AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics
AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom
881
Notes by djb on using Fil-C
I'm impressed with the level of compatibility of the new memory-safe C/C++ compiler Fil-C (filcc, fil++). Many libraries and applications that I've tried work under Fil-C without changes, and the exceptions haven't been hard to get working.
882
My failed attempt to shrink all NPM packages by 5%
It seemed like a great idea at first.
883
After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain
I've been building MVPs and SaaS products for 15 years. Let's work together on your next project.
884
How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
885
The realities of being a pop star
According to my experience...
886
Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines
Will Smith is being accused of generating fake fans with AI, but it's complicated: the crowds are real, but the videos were manipulated by Smith's team and YouTube itself.
887
How to be a leader when the vibes are off
...and the vibes are definitely off It feels different in tech right now. We’re coming off a long era where optimism carried the industry. Something has curdled. AI hype, return-to-office mandates, and continued layoffs have shifted the mood. Managers are quicker to fire, existential dread has replaced
888
Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts
When a datacenter fire threatened 142 of my servers, my backup strategy had them back online in hours. This post shares my personal philosophy on creating a resilient system, focusing on the crucial planning that must happen before you write a single script.
889
Tokens are getting more expensive
"language models will get cheaper by 10x" will not save ai subscriptions from the short squeeze
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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
Metr recently published a paper about the impact AI tools have on open-source developer productivity[^1]. They show that when open source developers working in codebases that they are deeply familiar with use AI tools to complete a task, then they take longer to complete that task compared to other tasks where they…
891
Why I Chose Common Lisp
After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure . I was writing a some CLI apps , and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It…
892
The electric fence stopped working years ago
"Don't worry, he won't leave the porch. The electric fence hasn't worked in years, but he still won't go past it."
893
How to negotiate your salary package
The complete guide to salary negotiation for engineers and other professionals who think negotiating is morally questionable.
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Archival Storage
I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage . Below the fold is the text of the talk with...
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Moving on from 18F
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
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1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature
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GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search
“Don’t use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years... until it wasn’t. I wrote about how good OpenAI’s o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back …
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Tilde, My LLVM Alternative
I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…
900
How to modify Starlink Mini to run without the built-in WiFi router
The Starlink Mini terminal is designed as a compact, all-in-one solution with an integrated Wi-Fi router. While this design is ideal for typical consumer use, certain applications—such as custom networking setups, embedded installations, or power-constrained environments—may benefit from removing the internal router…