Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
To create reliable agents, AI companies had to go beyond predicting the next token.
New research could have big implications for copyright lawsuits against generative AI.
hiring in tech is broken and everyone knows it. what can we do better?
Hints of discrimination and lack of principled reasoning in frontier AI systems
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.
If your service needs to trust the clients, hold my Big Mac
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Let's first not talk about why this can happen, but deleting /lib, /usr/lib, or some other essential runtime files happens quite a lot (as you can see: here, here, here, and here). In this post, I will only discuss what happens when you delete /lib on Linux and how to recover from that. The easy
moved to https://blog.efitz.net/posts/my-experience-creating-software-with-llm-coding-agents-part-2-tips/
Gnarled JavaScript warlock, musician, cartoonist, dilettante.
It started with a simple thought: four bytes in a hash table bucket look just like an integer. Luckily, this one idea led to a deep dive into bit-twiddling and a 2x performance boost.
Word2vec is a pervasive tool for learning word embeddings. Its success, however, is mostly due to particular architecture choices. Transferring these choices to traditional distributional methods makes them competitive with popular word embedding methods.
A Love Story Between Two Amazing Languages 🦀💜
Reproduce Deepseek R1 „aha moment“ and train an open model using reinforcement learning trying to teach it self-verification and search abilities all on its own to solve the Countdown Game.
Why FreeBSD instead of Linux for home servers? Exploring ZFS, jails, stability, and the reasons behind choosing FreeBSD for a home infrastructure.
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.
Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy - retrohax.net I once wrote a blog post about Nintendo Wii controllers. That post was already based on ...
Stephen Wolfram discusses understanding proofs discovered using automated theorem proving. Based on Wolfram’s proof of the simplest axioms of logic of Boolean algebra.
Some questions are timeless, innocent yet penetrating in their simplicity. Why is the sky blue? Why do things fall? How hard must one hit a chicken to cook it? It is this last mystery of the universe that we discuss today.
Stop vibe-coding blindly! Why reading AI-generated code is crucial in 2025. Avoid security flaws, architectural decay, and knowledge loss when using Claude Code or any other tool.
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the geniu...
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
Based on the latest tests I've published, Django LiveView appears to be the fastest dynamic frontend (I'm sure more variables can be measured). OK…
I’m adding immutable vectors to my language, Ivan, and needed to pick a suitable data structure to implement them. Clojure uses Persistent Vectors (PVs) which support lookups, updates, and appends all in ‘effectively’ constant time. However, it doesn’t have efficient insert or merge operations. Relaxed Radix Balanced…
I like bits, bits are mighty. With bits you can do impressive things!
In computer science, we often compare the efficiency of algorithms by describing their runtime as a function of the size of the input. Sorting is O(n * log(n)), meaning that sorting a list of N items takes an amount of time proportional to the number of items multiplied by its logarithm. Matrix multiplication is…
