Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,706 posts.
A few years ago I met a guy, let’s call him Jim, who was trying to break in tech by going to a bootcamp to become a developer. In the meantime, he worked as a bartender and had been living off the support of his girlfriend, who was from a well-off family and Jim was her trophy boyfriend. He approached me because he…
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
Energy matters for AI, but the decisive layers are cloud infrastructure, data, and commercialization. On those layers the United States is ahead by a wide margin.
With the release of the WSL 3.x stack, Microsoft bumped the default virtualization runtime and advanced the shipped guest kernel from the 6.6 LTS branch up to 6.18. WSL upgrades often claim generalized performance gains, but marketing bullet points rarely translate directly to developer workloads. To see what actually…
The LISP curse is often quoted as the reason why so few libraries and reusable components exist for LISP dialects. According to the concept, LISP is so power...
Rescuing a field from disappearing
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
Small local libraries are now becoming travel destinations
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
And why you would want to exec a cpio
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
I stopped working on the reverse-engineered Apple Neural Engine (ANE) driver three years ago, upon a sad mini realization that the ANE block is just not that useful, and I could be doing more useful things, and moved onto upstreaming other, more useful, blocks. The ANE's architecture was too opinionated to build a…
SBOM 1.0: A specification for sandwich supply chain transparency.
After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell — Avi Press
We all learned in science class that water freezes at 0 °C or 32 °F at atmospheric pressure. But what water, exactly? Even after you distill out all the dissolved salts and minerals to get pure H2O…
A Flask cookie on developers.google.com was signed with a secret it carried inside itself. Pulling that secret out turned a forged session into code execution across Google's developer sites.
Do you know how a hard drive works? Come find out with me as I dump, reverse engineer, and modify the firmware on various HDDs and SSDs.
This blog post and the companion video both explain an erosion technique I’ve worked on over the past eight months. The video has lots of e...
We don’t need an extra reason to be anxious
X.400 promised recallable, scheduled, self-destructing email. Why simple SMTP won instead, and what we lost and gained when it did.
around a year ago, we built a regex engine in F# that not only outperformed the ones in dotnet, but went above and beyond competing with every other industrial regex engine on a large set of industry-standard benchmarks. it also supports the full set of boolean operators (union, intersection, complement) and even a…
There is a moment in every investigation where the thing you have been looking for finds you instead.
When we first announced the transition to Plasma Wayland, one of Martin's slides from stated, "It's done when it's done!"
Plus Fly’s new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time
Comparison is the thief of joy.
