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Have you restarted your computer this week?
There’s something about restarting my Mac on a …
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,221 posts.
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OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
Soundtrack: In Flames - Colony To further support my independent journalism, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $7 a month or $70 a year. If you’re subscribed to the free newsletter and logged in, you should see at the bottom right hand corner of your screen a little
18123
Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a journalist at the New York Times, who asked if I felt that film critics were losing touch with the tastes of the broader public.
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Policies that make the poor less poor
We should have policies to make the poor less poor. Unfortunately, policies explicitly aimed at trying to make the poor less poor typica...
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Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina
A bundle called IncompatibleAppsList.bundle found in /Library/Apple/Library/Bundles/ in macOS Catalina contains a of list of 235 apps that are incompatible with Catalina.
18126
Why Clojure? (2010)
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
18127
When tech says ‘no’
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’
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American solar farms
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
18129
The Amish health care system
I. Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them? A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colon…
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Anti-If: The missing patterns (2016)
Software development blog of Joe Wright
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Nowhere is safe
Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batterie…
18132
Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…
18133
Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea
Disclaimer: Thoughts expressed here are my own, and not of my employers.
18134
Python: Just Write SQL
I have been writing a lot more Go this past year. For those not familiar, Go favours a non-ORM, non-query-builder approach to interacting with databases. This comes naturally due to the sql package : A common interface to be used alongside database drivers. It’s very common to see actual SQL in Go, even in large…
18135
Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
18136
Avoid the Apple App Store
Have you ever though about building an iOS app? I did, but I now wish that I hadn’t.
18137
What’s the best non-smart TV sold today?
With the industry-wide transition to smart TVs many of us have felt like there is no option but to get one. And the walls are closing in -- it seems like almost every TV sold today is a smart one, which means a lack of control of what's happening on our device, the possibility of
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Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
Explained by a former Sony engineer
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VCs are scared when they should be greedy
I originally wrote this essay for The Information, where it was published on July 6, 2022. I've read a lot of the advice that venture capitalists have given founders on the current state of the...
18141
Eight more months of agents
I wrote up my experiences programming with LLMs a bit over a year ago , and updated it for the world of agents eight months ago . A lot has changed since then, so here is an update.
18142
Shopify elevated the non-manager career path and ditched meetings
The difference between crafters and managers and how Shopify rages against meetings
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Switching from Gmail to FastMail
I switched from Gmail to FastMail a few months ago (in early 2013) and I’ve been meaning to write a post about how I did it.
18146
Making Python Programs Blazingly Fast
<p> <i>Python</i> haters always say, that one of reasons they don't want to use it, is that it's <i>slow</i>. Well, whether specific program - regardle...
18147
Why Use F#?
Why you should consider using F# for your next project
18148
Is the reversal curse in LLMs real?
A recent paper The Reversal Curse points out an apparent failure in large large language models like GPT-4. From the abstract: We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is
18149
Turn on MFA Before Crooks Do It for You
Hundreds of popular websites now offer some form of multi-factor authentication (MFA), which can help users safeguard access to accounts when their password is breached or stolen. But people who don’t take advantage of these added safeguards may find it far more difficult to regain access when their account gets…
18150
SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow
I've been sitting on publishing these notes for a while, because I don't want to diminish the work of the talented people that engineered SwiftUI and plowed through years of AppKit and UIKit code to get to this state. But I'd like to draw attention to some performance limitations, in the hope that a SwiftUI engineer…