Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,699 posts.
Archaeologists have uncovered a royal archive of cuneiform tablets in the ancient Hittite city of Samuha, modern-day Sivas, central Turkey. This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life…
Make QR codes with photos in them
Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
A blog about software craft and quality
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…
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…
Posts on software engineering – engineering culture, system legibility, and performance.
The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day. I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.
Exploring the Weapon-Target Assignment problem: how missile defense connects to NP-completeness, SSPK probability calculations, and how saturation attacks exploit computational limits.
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
Personal home page of Tony
For the past couple years, I have transported my 'working set' of video and project data to and from work on an external Thunderbolt NVMe SSD. But it's always been slow when I do the sync. In a typical day, I may generate a new project folder with 500-1000 individual files, and dozens of them may be 1-10 GB in size…
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
I like supporting local businesses but it's so disheartening to see the increasing use of genAI in their branding/marketing/etc. Yuck yuck YUCK!!!
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
Wow. It’s been over fourteen years since the last time I wrote a post on this blog. In those fourteen years, the world has changed, and so have I. So this isn't going to be a technical post, it's going to be personal. One of those subtle changes that quietly crept into my life over
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
SSH port forwarding explained in a clean and visual way. How to use local and remote port forwarding. What sshd settings may need to be adjusted. How to memorize the right flags.
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re…
A technique for accurate text and numbers in AI-generated images: generate the layout deterministically, then ask the image model to paint on top.
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of…
The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference.
If acceleration compounds, the naive extrapolation implies superintelligence within a year
