15871
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,217 posts.
15872
15873
Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer
Understanding large codebase can be incredibly difficult. In this post I walk through how I learn a codebase use turbopack as my case study.
15874
Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator, a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer. Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006…
15875
How I Build
My idea of a vacation might be weird to some. Sure, I like sunshine, I like beaches – but more than all that, I like making stuff with computers.
15876
SQLite internals: How the most-used database works
Explore SQLite Internals: How The World's Most Used Database Works by Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer. Deep dive into database internals, systems engineering, and advanced Python.
15877
On modern hardware the min-max heap beats a binary heap
The heap is a data structure that I use all the time and that others somehow use rarely. (I once had a coworker tell me that he knew some code was mine because it used a heap) Recently I was writin…
15878
Rest In Peace, John. I was lucky to know you so deeply
I met John Paragon, Jambi the genie on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, at the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings, where both our careers started. He was sly and wickedly funny. We became best friends instantly. In a group of exceptionally talented and […]
15879
Geometry, Algebra, and Intuition (2017)
I have a confession to make: I have always found symbolic algebra more intuitive than geometric pictures. I think you’re supposed to feel the opposite way, and I greatly admire people who think and communicate in pictures, but for me, it’s usually a struggle.
15880
Simple product management tricks
Three simple tricks product I’ve picked up that help me be more than completely useless when I need to wear a Product hat.
15881
Daring Fireball: Steve Jobs Dies
Link to: http://www.apple.com/
15882
Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone photos
I noted here, I believe, that recently my dSLR, my Nikon d750, basically crapped itself, most likely from a faulty mirror mechanism. This wasn’t entirely a surprise to me — it had devel…
15883
Why Python Is Not My Favorite Language (2016)
Historical reference to Ian Denhardt’s Why Python Is Not My Favorite Language (2016-12-25), with archive and current documentation links.
15884
15885
15886
What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
15887
15888
He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
Ask ChatGPT to estimate the carbs in your lunch. Now ask it again. And again. Five hundred times. You’d expect the same answer each time. It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a
15889
How to spot a good fake ID
One of my favorite things in the world is the very specific, strange competencies that people develop over the course of a job. Carpenters might be able to estimate the length of anything just by looking at it, architects might be able to quickly sketch a remarkably accurate picture from memory, etc.
15890
The TTY demystified (2008)
The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user.
15891
Your Move, iPad
Hear that? It’s the sound of Mac fans. No, not your shiny new M1 Mac’s fans—chances are, you’ll never hear those—but rather, the sound of excitement rippling through the Mac community. This is something big. Really big. Now, I’m only 33, but someday when I go full fuddy-duddy I will speak of this: the great…
15892
Red and blue functions are a good thing
By avoiding effect aware functions a language hobbles engineers and makes programs sloppier than they could be.
15893
Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
15894
15895
LLMs confabulate not hallucinate
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
15896
It's time to build: a New World's Fair
We must look to the past — to the World's Fairs — to build the future.
15897
15898
Carbon’s most exciting feature is its calling convention
Last week, Chandler Carruth announced Carbon, a potential C++ replacement they’ve been working on for the past two years. It has the usual cool features you expect from a modern language: useful generics, compile-time interfaces/traits/concepts, modules, etc. – but the thing I’m most excited about is a tiny detail…
15899
Goodbye C++, Hello C
Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…
15900
Cases where full scans are better than indexes
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…