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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,699 posts.
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How I'm fighting the AI brain fry
If you work with Claude Code or Codex from the terminal, you know this one.
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Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
Wolfram's Foundation Tool supplements LLM foundation models with deep computation and precise knowledge. CAG (computation-augmented generation) underlies multiple access methods.
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Running a law firm on Free software
I started running decoded.legal - a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law - on Free software, both client and server side, around five years ago. I have used Free software in my personal life for a lot longer than that.
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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
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An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights
Dear Dario, You published We Must Pace the Frontier today, which committed Anthropic to embedded third-party evaluators and asked governments to require every other frontier company to match. Sam Altman agreed within hours.1 The stated goal is to slow down the pace of AI progress. I believe you’re being sincere, so…
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Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format
Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header’s JavaScript making HTTP range requests. It is used on Gwern.net to serve large HTML archives.
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OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS
The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. There was no safety.
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The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Se...
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Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it
How bots used our sign-up and forgot password pages to bomb real people's inboxes, and what we did to stop it. A practical guide to subscription bombing for founders and developers who think CAPTCHA is an "I'll do it later" task.
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Awesome repositories are no longer awesome
Erik Gahner Larsen
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Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-Bit Symmetric Keys
There is no need to update symmetric key sizes as part of the post-quantum transition, due to the details of how Grover's algorithm scales. Most authorities agree.
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But yak shaving is fun (2019)
KO | EN | Discussions on HN Alexandr frolov (CC BY-SA 4.0) This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in ...
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Techno‑feudal elite are attempting to build a twenty‑first‑century fascist state
Introduction: Fascism at the End of Industrial Civilization This essay argues that the United States is drifting toward a distinctly twenty‑first‑century form of fascism driven not by mass parties …
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The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python
A perceptron explained from scratch in Python, with interactive demos. Learn weights, bias, the decision boundary, epochs, learning rate, and why we normalize data.
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The user is visibly frustrated
In this article, I try to understand why coding agents can be infuriating to use. I think the problem is their conversational UX: they behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don't learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repeated mistakes feel…
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What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
You might have heard that all the ants in the world weigh as much combined as all the humans. That isn’t true. We outweigh ants 5 to 1.1 Termites might have us beat, though.2 Either way, it’s not r…
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Jira Is Turing-Complete
Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian's project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete . Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.
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You can't unit test for taste
I’m building In the Long Run where runners do virtual runs on famous routes around the world. The app tallies up your Strava mileage and plots your total distance as progress against country- or continent-spanning routes. The intention is to provide long-term inspiration and motivation; life is a marathon, not a…
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Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
There is an extremely important question about the near-future of AI that almost no-one is asking. We’ve all seen the graphs from METR showing that the length of tasks AI agents can perform has been growing exponentially over the last 7 years. While GPT-2 could only do software engineering tasks t
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Voxel Space (2017)
Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code
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How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
AI forced me to abandon evidence-based best pedagogy practices, focus on oral and written exams, and redo most assignments. Here is what we did in 17-645...
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Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
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Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
A blog about software craft and quality
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“Why not just use Lean?”
I have been told that when proposing to formalise mathematics these days, you have to explain why you are not using Lean. And that reminds me why I left the dependent-typed world 40 years ago: its cultism, insularity and conformity. Lean is a great language with good tools, a large library and a huge, enthusiastic…