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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,187 posts.
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Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
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In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
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GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and system card
I’ve had preview access to the new GPT-5 model family for the past two weeks (see related video and my disclosures) and have been using GPT-5 as my daily-driver. It’s …
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Six Figures in 6 days
This title is a little misleading.
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How to sell a B2B product
Lately, a bunch of early stage founders have emailed me to ask for go-to-market (GTM) advice. They have a real product, it solves a real problem for their handful of customers…
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Parse, Don’t Validate
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
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Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...
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Interview advice that got me offers
“What would you say if I asked you to design me a service capable of responding to thousands of user requests every second and latency was critical?”
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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Economics of Minecraft
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy
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The highest quality codebase
Blog post
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The Problem with AMP
Details about accelerated mobile pages and their numerous issues
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The Hand Licking Incident
When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his ha...
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Get your loved ones off Facebook
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
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Radios, how do they work?
A brief introduction to antennas, superheterodyne receivers, and signal modulation schemes.
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Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust
I think the Rust language is a big success. When I think back on it I am in awe: so much had to go right to get where we are, and there were so many opportunities to go wrong. It took many tiny miracles for the Rust language to become what it has. Those miracles didn’t happen by accident though: each one was created…
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The Marco.org Review of John Siracusa’s Review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
The time has finally come: today, Ars Technica released John Siracusa’s review of the newest version of OS X .
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How to store your app's entire state in the url
I'm working on a flowchart editor that runs in the browser, and I wanted a way for people to use it without having to sign in, or store any data on our server. I wanted to give them control over their data and to be able to store it locally to open and edit later. And also easily share it with other people. It's easy…
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RSS: there's nothing better
“An RSS feed? That’s so 2007!” “Well then what do you suggest instead?”
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How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
TLDR: Bank of America is a horrible business and it should be ashamed by how bad it is. Two weeks ago, I suddenly received emails informing me that my Bank of America…
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Lesser Known Coding Fonts
In the past few months, I’ve become interested—fascinated even—by programming fonts. As programmers we look at text all day: code, logs, command outputs, monitoring tools, etc. If we’re going to be looking at text all day, we might as well make it easy and pleasant for our eyes to read that text.
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Fun with uv and PEP 723
How to use uv and the Python inline script metadata proposal PEP 723 to run scripts seamlessly.
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Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars
Big companies have a way of accidentally stepping on little companies sometimes. But every once in awhile, they leave us better off.
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes