Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,177 posts.
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
A new email-based extortion scheme apparently is making the rounds, targeting Web site owners serving banner ads through Google’s AdSense program. In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher’s ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google’s automated anti-fraud…
That NPM attack could have been so much worse.
The current state of Apple’s software documentation is the worst I’ve ever seen for any framework anywhere. Apple needs to fix this—now.
As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work . I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the…
We've all experienced frustration with the internet going down. Now imagine how frustrated you'd be if you found out that your ISP intentionally blocked your internet access for the purpose of advertising their software; and better yet, your ISP claimed that state legislators required them to do it!...
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I’ve been on Nexuses and Pixels since Nexus one. Stock-or-nothing was me. However, the mobile phone market has become a bit stale and…
Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.
Staying in touch with people is one of these asymmetric habits that require little effort, time and resources but has an unlimited upside.
Over two years ago, in one of my first public talks about Ghostty , I shared my vision for libghostty : an embeddable library for any application to embed their own fully functional, modern, and fast terminal emulator. Libghostty is finally starting to take shape, and I'm excited to share more details about my plans…
You and your good buddy, Steve Steveington, are in training for an arduous charity walk. You signed up together on the spur of the moment and pledged to hold each other accountable whilst you got in shape for the big day. However, you have developed reason to suspect that Steve Steveington is losing his commitment to…
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
The Overly Analytical Guide to Escorting
Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.
This article was discussed on Hacker News, and was cited in The Mathematical Gazette. Introduction This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year discussing the likelihood of encountering two…
Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This t…
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.
There’s a well-known quote by author Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I like it because it doesn’t attempt to be dogmatic: it encapsulates some basic guiding principles that get you 90% of the way there 90% of the time. Wikipedia describes the book the quote is from (emphasis mine):
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some…
AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to...
A bit of inspiration (and some hopefully actionable advice) for folks who are still working at day jobs.
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
