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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,224 posts.
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The minimum viable unit of saleable software
LLMs made software cheaper to build, but not free. A look at the new buy-vs-build math of the LLM age, and the pricing zone where small software businesses can still survive.
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AI children's books, body horror edition
Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content.
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Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
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Implementing Logic Programming
I just think it's neat!
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Lessons Learned after $5B of M&A
Learn key M&A insights from $5B in startup exits. Discover 10 proven strategies for founders on building relationships, navigating acquisitions & maximizing deal value.
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Paper, by MiSoft
Link to: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/paper/id510847136?mt=8
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Explaining my fast 6502 code generator
To learn how optimizing compilers are made, I built one targeting the 6502 architecture . In a bizarre twist, my compiler generates faster code than GCC, LLVM, and every other compiler I compared it to.
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How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services
I get a lot of people popping up with data breaches for Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP). There’s an interesting story in that itself actually, one I must get around to writing in the future as folks come from all sorts of different backgrounds and offer
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Turbo Haskell
Exactly a week ago (as a joke), I started writing THC, my “Turbo Haskell compiler,” while on vacation visiting Bartosz Milewski.
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Gittip at Khan Academy
For a while now I’ve been a huge fan of Gittip . I think they’ve created one of the most interesting models for funding Open Source development.
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Sierpiński Triangle? In My Bitwise and?
Exploring a peculiar bit-twiddling hack at the intersection of 1980s geek sensibilities.
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A $5000 Chair
This the story of a black faux-leather chair, the kind you can buy at Walmart for $99, that ended up costing me five grand. Very early in the days of Distil, my partner Steve and I hooked up with t…
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Dual-touch smartphone design concept
Smartphones have a thumb problem. The touchscreen is a magical invention, but it definitely has its shortcomings.
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My Friend Bob Cringely
Bob Cringely died on Oct 3, 2026
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PostgreSQL Basics by Example
Connecting to a database 1 2 $ psql postgres # the default database $ psql database_name Connecting as a specific user 1 2 $ psql postgres john $ …
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How to Teach a Child to Argue
Figaro rips the innards out of things people say and reveals the rhetorical tricks and pratfalls. For terms and definitions, click here . (What are figures of speech?) Ask Figaro a question!
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Useful Spy Books
Reading a good book is a great joy. And recommending a good book is almost as enjoyable. I’ve long been fascinated by books on espionage, and this contributed in no small part to me eventually joining the Dutch intelligence world, and later, rejoining it in some fashion. If you have favorite books that should be on…
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Haiku package management
I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
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Thomas Jefferson and Apple versus the FBI
When Prohibition began, anti-alcohol crusaders demanded that the St. Louis Public Library burn every book that explained "the home production of alcohol for drinks". The librarian insisted on keeping the books but agreed to hide them from the "general public".
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Of SVG, Minification and Gzip
Smaller files are downloaded faster, so making an asset file size smaller before sending it to a client is a good thing to do.
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My url isn't your url
When I started the precursor to the curl project, httpget, back in 1996, I wrote my first URL parser. Back then, the universal address was still called URL: Uniform Resource Locators. That spec was published by the IETF in 1994. The term "URL" was then used as source for inspiration when naming the tool and … Continue…
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The Clock in the Mountain
A work crane at the Clock site in western Texas. There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the … Continue reading →
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A programming language from scratch: 3 steps to an interpreter
A little while ago I wrote about 16bitjs, a 16 bit virtual machine written in javascript. It implemented a custom CPU architecture and assembly language, assembler, and debugger. I had the thought …
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Ratfactor's illustrated guide to folding fitted sheets
Note to the impatient: You can just scroll down to the drawings of fitted sheets being folded. You won’t hurt my feelings. (I’ll never even know.) But you may want to bookmark this page for later instead. You can get fast at folding fitted sheets. But to learn how to fold fitted sheets is going to take some patience…