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First Principles Thinking
On first principles thinking, learning to work with agents, and setting experience aside long enough to see a problem clearly.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,700 posts.
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William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
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Text-based web browsers
How do they fare with (not so) recent additions to HTML?
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Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about…
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The bee that everyone wants to save
My neighbour has 50 hives, the road has 30 more. That's 4 million honeybees, and not one of them is the bee that actually needs saving.
1296
Apple iPod Engraver (2019)
Making the iPod engraver page for Apple’s online store
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Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
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Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
The toolkit for spec-driven development. Write feature specs, not prompts. Ship better software with AI agents that understand your requirements.
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RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
Agentic coding presents an existential threat to a broad set of low-code tools.
1301
Making big downloads resumable in Firefox
This was posted in the TIL section, the low-effort section of my website where I post things that I find useful, but that don't get the full quality checks content elsewhere on this site does.
1302
I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert
A Two Part Post on the Immense Promise and Ecological Tragedy of Natural Herbertsmithite Crystals
1303
The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …
1304
“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders
Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders are flat “billboarded” stock images of food? This artistic decision from director Masahiro Sakurai has per...
1305
Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
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GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)
GPT-2 is a direct scale-up of GPT-1 , with more parameters and trained on more data. However, it was deemed too dangerous to release by OpenAI:
1308
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
1309
A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents
Welcome to the digital home of Daniel Ball. Explore my portfolio to see the projects I’ve worked on and learn more about my professional journey.
1310
Design is compromise
Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. It’s finding the right balance between two competing ...
1311
I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
1312
The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
1313
Choosing a Public DNS Resolver
Compare 30 global public DNS resolvers by privacy, filtering, DNSSEC, DoH, DoT, DoQ, IPv6, and jurisdiction, and benchmark DoH speed from your browser.
1314
The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
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Write for One Person
If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics !
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I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
I built KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound LLMs and coding agents, and benchmarked the major models against it.
1319
Google has abandoned Google News?
You know that scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest sees Lieutenant Dan on the shore and is so distracted by him that he jumps off and swims to shore, allowing the boat to crash into the dock? ...
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How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.