20341
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,239 posts.
20342
Pasta Cooking Time
I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time, and when I taste one it's already getting too mushy. I decided to run a small experiment to get a better sense of how cooked I like pasta. I decided to use Market…
20343
Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation
My AI nuclear simulation is out now, and it's a WOPR.
20344
Rolling the ladder up behind us
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
20345
How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect
How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. | exotext
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My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
I shared this internally at Meta in response to a deluge of clout-chasing posts celebrating PMs landing prod diffs. The response was positive and the message generalizes, so here we are on the open www. PMs shouldn’t waste time landing … Continue reading →
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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing | exotext
20351
An argument for a return to Web 1.0
The web was established with the best of intentions. The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top. The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.
20352
Easy Forth (2015)
This small ebook is here to teach you a programming language called Forth. Forth is a language unlike most others. It’s not functional or object oriented, it doesn’t have type-checking, and it basically has zero syntax. It was written in the 70s, but is still used today for certain applications .
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The New York Times is wrong about Haiti
The New York Times recently published a series of articles about the history of Haiti.
20355
Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver
The more I think about the rift between political journalism and Nate Silver, the more it seems that it's one that's fundamentally an issue of epistemology — how journalists know what they know. Here's why I think that's the case. When we talk about the epistemology of journalism, it all eventually ties into…
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Dealing with Insomnia
A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of sleeping and the damage done by lack of sleep. I don’t necessarily subscribe to each and every bit in the book, there are…
20358
Tulips, Myths, and Cryptocurrencies
Did you hear the one about the tulip bubble? It’s almost certainly a myth. It is myths, though, that explain why cryptocurrencies are here to stay.
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Why are we even doing all this?
[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out…
20361
Criticizing Computers
Do you ever get really mad at your computer?
20362
What happens when the CCP decides that you need to die
The manner in which a state kills people has major implications for that state's structure
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SpaceX's Texas Rocket Is Going to Cause a Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks
On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a license for SpaceX to launch the first orbital test of Starship, the largest rocket in human history, as soon as this Monday, April 17th.
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20365
The IBM-ification of Google?
I used to think Google owning the full vertical stack was a masterstroke. Like TSMC silicon, TPUs, their own data centers, proprietary models, search engine....
20366
My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
20367
Don't Get Distracted (2017)
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
20368
There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.
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Using a Mac without a network connection
New version of ViableS runs in a sandbox, with no shared folders, and can now be isolated from networks. So how well does Ventura work without internet?