901
Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
Why random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
902
903
904
Let's Ban Billboards
Most improvements to cities are hard — they take millions of dollars and years of planning.
905
If nothing is curated, how do we find things
Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for th...
906
Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs
After 15 years as a software engineer, I realized I had never actually built and published a game.
907
Minimum Viable Blog
A place for me to vent about my current obsessions.
908
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really…
909
A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read.
910
The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
911
PDF to Text, a challenging problem
The search engine has recently gained the ability to index the PDF file format. The change will deploy over a few months. Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format. It…
912
I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
describing my wsc adventure
913
Compiler Explorer and the promise of URLs that last forever
How we're preserving 12,000 legacy links as Google's URL shortener rides into the sunset
914
TIL: timeout in Bash scripts
How to use the `timeout` command to terminate processes after a specified time and how to combine it with `until` for smarter shell scripting.
915
Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content
I have an incredibly boring summer hobby: looking at the changelog for the WebKit Github repo. Why? Because I spend a chunk of my professional life working with webviews inside mobile apps and I like to get an early peek into what's coming in the next version of iOS. Since
916
10 years of writing a blog nobody reads
flow2 | Blog post: 'On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads' in Personal
917
Self-contained Python scripts with uv
You can add uv into the shebang line for a Python script to make it a self-contained executable.
918
You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
919
How I block all online ads
A couple of years ago, I decided I'd had enough of ads. Not just the occasional banner or a quick pre-roll video — I mean all of them. They have to go.
920
An illustrated guide to OAuth
OAuth was first introduced in 2007.
921
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
Wealth inequality is driving the economy.
922
Formatting code should be unnecessary
and we knew this back in the 80s
923
We're losing our voice to LLMs
We are losing something precious in the age of LLMs: our unique voices.
924
Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
925
Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
Note: This post comes with a NotebookLM podcast (1linked at the bottom), and three generated audio recordings. You can read the conversation I had
926
Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …
927
Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful
When talking about REST, it is worth reading the dissertation of Roy Thomas Fielding. The original paper that describes RESTful web, “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” Roy T. Fielding (2000), introduces the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style as a…
928
Autism's confusing cousins
A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward
929
930
How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…