Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,240 posts.
Distributed Consensus – How Shared Data Is Stored
If you don’t work in computers, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how data gets stored on computers or in the cloud. I’m…
Undefined behavior in C is a reading error
Considering how important “undefined behavior” has become to C semantics and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 Committee, the lack of any reference to it in the K&R ANSI book is notable and the description in the 1999 C Rationale was quite modest.
On Being an Engineer in 2026
We all feel it. Every other week, we lose or delegate another part of our work to agents. It started with giving up on writing code. Then it expanded to pretty much any writing - Slack messages,…
Three Levels of Wealth
Slack is a lot like Twitter from my vantage point. It’s a service I use all the time. It’s become an integral part of my life from both a work and social perspective. Every time I talk to someone else who uses the service they share my love for the platform. And it’s almost impossible to explain its usefulness...
Allow babywearing carriers on planes
The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered"…
Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)
Adaptation, Algorithms and Ambience
Intel is dying and we can’t save it
How I realized that this is truly the end of the Intel era.
What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition
Over at MacRumors, Hartley Charlton pointed out something that hadn’t crossed my mind: Historically, Apple released at least one new Mac model every year in the fourth quarter that runs between October and December, starting in 2001 with the launch of the iBook G3. This means that there has been a new Mac toward the…
The Itanic Has Sunk
By today, July 29, 2021, Intel has shipped the last of its …
Thrown Off a United Airlines Flight for Taking Pictures
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever
Most of us have been trained to be wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive in emails unexpected, but it’s easy to forget scam artists are constantly dreaming up innovations that put a new shine on old-fashioned telephone-based phishing scams. Think you’re too smart to fall for one? Think again: Even…
I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me
After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from my original draft…
Sabotaging Bitcoin
Source I find myself in the unusual position of defending Bitcoin from its critics, if only reluctantly. In 2024 Soroush Farokhnia & Amir...
Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
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Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant
And your precious first principles math proves it
The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research. I chose DeepSeek V4 because I know it is cheap, but seeing it’s pricing next to Anthropic and OpenAI ‘frontier’ models is crazy. Nearly a 50x price increase based on tokens alone, let alone how much pondering any of their models might fall into (using…
Review: Purism Librem13 laptop
Last year Purism contacted me after they read on the Pepper&Carrot blog that my laptop has been stolen in the burglary of my house. At that time, they proposed me to contribute to my Pepper&Carrot project by sending me a shiny new Librem13 laptop. So, since October 2017 I have this laptop with me and because I saw a…
The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November
[UPDATE: This post was originally said that the SegWit2X fork will happen on November 1. In fact it is scheduled to occur on block 494,764 ...
A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
People are just as bad as my LLMs
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but […]
Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
The gavel has fallen; the cup has been stomped; pick your metaphor. Microsoft has succeeded in its almost-two-year quest to gobble up Activision. The peculiar side effect in my corner of the world is that Microsoft now owns the dusty remains ...