151
Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
Sadly, taking away valuable disclosure avoidance tools doesn't make fundamental trade-offs go away.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,696 posts.
152
Personal Encyclopedias
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
153
Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here’s how to fix it.
154
Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
155
Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
In iOS 26.3, Apple introduced a new privacy feature which limits “precise location” data made available to cellular networks via cell towers. The feature is only available to devices with Apple’s in-house modem introduced in 2025. The announcement1 says https://support.apple.com/en-us/126101 ↩
156
Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
A real-world production migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated, handling 248 GB of MySQL data across 30 databases, 34 Nginx sites, GitLab EE, Neo4j, and live mobile app traffic — with zero downtime.
157
158
Docker is weird
I decided to make my own container runtime for fun, and even though I’m still early on, I’ve learned that Docker is weird . Here’s some weird things I learned about Docker.
159
I said no and Apple said yes
The one where Apple decides consent doesn’t matter anymore.
160
Domain expertise has always been the real moat
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
161
Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
Three months ago I would have dismissed claims that AI could replace developers. Today, after using Claude Opus 4.5, I believe AI coding agents can absolutely replace developers.
162
How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
163
I am retiring from tech to live offline
AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
164
Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues
In the release notes for macOS 26.3 RC, Apple stated that the window-resizing issue I demonstrated in my recent blog post had been resolved.
165
I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
OR: an apology to my English teachers
166
Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
167
AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
Read about the hidden divide between self-inflicted irrelevance and real engineering leverage.
168
After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation. They are consistent with themselves and your prompt. But respect for the whole, there is not.
169
MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
Reverse engineering reveals how Paint and Photos embed a server-issued GUID into the pixels of locally generated AI images.
170
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology.
171
The 49MB web page
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
172
Sebastian Raschka's from-scratch video course on building reasoning models
Over 11 hours of coding videos on evaluation, inference-time scaling, reinforcement learning, and distillation, with Python and PyTorch.
173
Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no l...
174
I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
I was one of the very first advocates for AWS back when it was brand new - SQS, S3, EC2 SimpleDB - it was a lot smaller back then. In fact I...
175
Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns
176
I don't like passkeys
Why passkeys are a step back for personal security: examining account lockout risks, platform lock-in, hardware key limits, and fragile recovery flows.
177
Some things just take time
On friction, patience, and planting trees.
178
The coolest use for the Vision Pro
One day there will hopefully be a house on this land Over the last year, I admittedly haven’t used my Vision Pro a ton, but fairly recently I discovered a super handy use that it’s absolutely incredible at, provided you have the right tools. After years of apartment life my girlfriend and I have recently begun the…
179
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
180
Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core strategy was…