1621
Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
Thomas Dullien’s guide to software and SaaS B2B entrepreneurship.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,704 posts.
1622
Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)
I discuss several commonly held perspectives on the complex numbers and explore how their differences engage with several aspects of structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics.
1623
The tech monoculture is finally breaking
A personal look at the return of excitement in technology, from the gadgets of the 1990s to AI tools and a break from the tech monoculture.
1624
Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
Other than the names. The names are difficult.
1625
Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
The US House reading Dutch emails shows digital sovereignty is about who can access data, not just where it is stored.
1626
Punch yourself in the face with reality
Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.
1627
Don't classify, hallucinate
A useful pattern for LLM classification at scale is to let it hallucinate plausible, fake entities. Then resolve to real ones.
1628
Communities are not fungible
Why we can’t go home again
1629
How to make a damn website (2024)
A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.
1630
The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
The three companies (along with Mozilla, which is on one of their “ad features in the browser” kicks again) are drawing up a built-in advertising measurement system, called Attribution Level 1 , as a standard feature of web browsers. The system is intended to measure the effectiveness of advertising by enabling…
1631
O(x)Caml in Space
On 23 April, Borealis booted in orbit on DPhi Space's ClusterGate-2: a pure-OCaml CCSDS protocol stack with end-to-end-encrypted command and control and post-quantum key rotation. OxCaml is what comes next.
1632
1633
What TLA+ can and can't check
Let's chill just a little bit on the "TLA+ will save AI from itself" narrative
1634
Grief and the AI split
TL;DR: AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.
1635
Sol loves to cheat
Adventures in harness engineering
1636
As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
A blog about software craft and quality
1637
The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
A 4-year study of 100 successful blogs reveals how Google's updates and AI transformed blogging. See which sites survived and which disappeared.
1638
An incoherent Rust
Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.
1639
Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts
We can mostly blame Internet Explorer, as always.
1640
Navier-Stokes fluid simulation explained with Godot game engine
When I first stumbled upon fluid simulations in game dev I was amazed on how good the effect could be. I really wan...
1641
Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
I already did.
1642
Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had
SQLite has evolved far beyond a simple embedded database. Explore modern features like JSON, FTS5, window functions, strict tables, and more.
1643
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.
1644
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
1645
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
1646
A Lament for Aperture
I'm an old Mac-head at heart, and I've been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don't tend to think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there's a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my…
1647
Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
1648
A warning about 'model welfare'
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.
1649
It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
It all started in the winter of 2024. There was a burglary in our apartment building and we decided we needed to invest in our home’s security. The …
1650
I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
Driven by curiosity, I decided to find out what the IndieWeb tag that kept showing up on some blogs and Mastodon toots was all about. I quickly…