1981
When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army
DEF CON has alienated many hackers by officially aligning its geopolitics with those of the U.S. military and announcing partnerships with the authoritarian countries of Bahrain and Singapore.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
1982
The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)
The Internet Slum
1983
How many artists' careers did the Beatles kill?
The sinister side of rock 'n' roll
1984
Odin: A programming language made for me
In my book Understanding the Odin Programming Language I wrote that “Odin incorporates some of my favorite C best practices, straight into the language”. But I didn’t really elaborate on the details. Let’s do that here! This brings me to talking a bit about a previous job I had. Back in 2021 I worked at a place called…
1985
Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
Reading research papers and articles about chain-of-thought reasoning makes me frustrated. There are many interesting questions to ask about chain-of-thought…
1986
Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)
Drilling beneath the hype to expose the truth
1987
Better Shell History Search
I spend an awful lot of my day in Unix terminals running shell commands. For some reason, the variance in efficiency between different people when using the shell is huge: I know people who can run rings around me, and I’ve come across more than one paid professional who doesn’t use the “up” key to retrieve the…
1988
The Cost of a Closure in C
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
1989
Selling Lemons
Personal site of designer Frank Chimero
1990
How to increase your surface area for luck
You should just do things
1991
Wheel Reinventor’s Principles (2024)
Software engineer by day, software engineer by night also.
1992
Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers
This article contains a collection of resources for senior (or staff+) engineers exploring the use of LLM for collaborative programming.
1993
Graphics livecoding in Common Lisp
Developing a Boids program from scratch without restarting it.
1994
Modern CI is too complex and misdirected (2021)
The state of CI platforms is much stronger than it was just a few years ago. Overall, this is a good thing: access to powerful CI platforms enables software developers and companies to ship more reliable software more frequently, which benefits its users/customers. Centralized CI platforms like GitHub Actions, GitLab…
1995
Pre-commit hooks are broken
use pre-push hooks instead
1996
Building my childhood dream PC
In 1993, I was 14 and already passionate about computers [1] . That year my mother managed to buy a PC for the household. That was quite an effort for a single mother. My brother Aurelien and I spent every waking hour on this machine, staying up all night on weekends.
1997
Teach, Don't Tell (2013)
This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it's about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries.
1998
Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock
oddlama's personal web page and blog
1999
Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…
2000
Design Pressure: The Invisible Hand That Shapes Your Code
Ever had this weird gut feeling that something is off in your code, but couldn’t put the finger on why? Are you starting your projects with the best intentions, following all best practices, and still feel like your architecture turns weird eventually?
2001
Cheap DIY solar fence design
A year ago I installed a 4 kilowatt solar fence . I'm revisiting it this Sun Day , to share the design, now that I have prooved it out.
2002
Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?
IRB you kidding me?
2003
Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
2004
A 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159` (2024)
An indie project for early 2010s internet addicts
2005
2006
Bulletproof host Stark Industries evades EU sanctions
In May 2025, the European Union levied financial sanctions on the owners of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd. , a bulletproof hosting provider that materialized two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and quickly became a top source of Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But new findings show those…
2007
Lua for Elixir
Execute sandboxed Lua code on the BEAM VM using Luerl
2008
Notes on OpenAI o3-mini
OpenAI’s o3-mini is out today. As with other o-series models it’s a slightly difficult one to evaluate—we now need to decide if a prompt is best run using GPT-4o, o1, …
2009
Alpha Centauri
In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.
2010
Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds
Just kidding. Of course, I have something to say about this. In the company, we look at the art of Homeworld from time to time and bow to the creators of this masterpiece. Once, we talked about how great the background look and how interesting this sketched style is. There is something…some details seem…special to us: