Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,182 posts.
If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that's not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There's no way that other thing makes sense.
There's a meme that's been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more technically interesting. Paul Graham says that the best way to make money is to "start or join a startup", which has been "a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years", and that you…
How Relational Databases Work. This post talks about how indexes and transactions work on the inside of relational databases.
Spoiler: it doesn’t. But it should.
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital…
I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro…
Every other service that tries to answer “What time is it in London?” gets it right. Only Siri gets it wrong.
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed…
We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to whi…
You can’t. That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one. Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat e…
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or...
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
Three years ago, while searching for Vitsoe setups, I stumbled upon Barbican. I delved deeper and discovered a building complex that was beyond my imaginations. Young Fatih would definitely find it ugly; current me finds it beautiful. The estate was built between 1965 and 1976. And, since I first saw
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It’s the story of how I was laid off from Google before I even started to do my job there.
An homage to Aphyr's Typing the technical interview
One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.
How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.
Sharing my salary history to help women understand what they should be making.
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a…
Article removed for legal reasons, sorry. After receiving a Czech version of a cease and desist letter from a legal representative of A. F., I've removed the article. You'll find articles based on my story in “Recommended reading” below, go read them.
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise?
I quite like to break things. While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction. Some developer friends of mine have lamented that they didn’t show me software before they released it. Because I sometimes find annoying bugs…
