Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the last two years was, for me, the realization that people not only care about compiling C to Rust (for obvious reasons, such as, ahem, memory safety) – they also care about compiling Rust to C! Wait, what?
There’s something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it’s written by a human. I think I finally put my finger on one reason why I feel this way.
What are we even doing here??
One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved
NVIDIA sent me a preview unit of their new DGX Spark desktop “AI supercomputer”. I’ve never had hardware to review before! You can consider this my first ever sponsored post …
=== This is a free online edition of Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. === Coverted to webpage by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, and updated November 2023. === Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons…
This article describes my nginx configuration and strategy on how to prevent web crawlers from putting down my instance while still serving most people with minimal amount of friction.
Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.
You can make your own website. This guide can help anyone make a website with HTML and CSS. You can make a personal site, link tree, hobby site, digital garden, fansite, or any other website you want. It's fun, and easy enough for a 12-year-old.
A guide to AI and LLM evals for engineers and product managers. Learn how to test AI systems, analyze failures, and improve retrieval, agents, and AI products.
Blog posts and articles by author and game developer Jordan Mechner
Clarifying the shebang (#!) mechanism: A step-by-step look using strace and kernel code shows how Linux handles script execution directly, revealing the shell isn't involved initially.
Clickbait disclaimer: Stunts was actually created by Distinctive Software; Brøderbund was only the publisher. But nobody heard about Distinctive , and I wanted to be sure this article does not get confused with the one about Disney's Stunt Island . Sorry about that.
A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10, but today 1 [ 1 Apparently, it was the System/360 that really set the standard here. ] all systems use 8-bit bytes and that now seems natural. 2 [ 2 Though you still see RFCs use "octet", and the C standard has a CHAR_BITS macro, to…
Why? · As I wrote in Not an Amazon Problem (and please go read that if you haven’t) I don’t see myself as an enemy of Amazon, particularly. I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to…
People should spend less time learning DSA, more time learning testing.
After 15 years with Neovim, I'm trying out Zed as my daily driver text editor. In this post, I share why I'm switching and what my initial impressions are.
I wrote an MCP server to give LLMs read-only access to my emails. Here is the chat log.
Craft a mansion and uncover mysteries in this exceptional marriage of storytelling and roguelike mechanics.
I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science , and a paper mentioned the compound Cr 2 Gr 2 Te 6 . For a moment, I thought my knowl...
High-degree polynomial features aren’t inherently unstable: the power basis and unscaled inputs are. This post shows how regularization and Bernstein polynomials make polynomial regression behave.
My journey making a Sudoku variant that doesn’t have rows or columns
I’ve written a bit about Nix and I still face moments where foundational aspects of the package system confounds and surprises me.
Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on. About two months ago, I reread several series on military
Even though I am a C++ programmer at heart, Go fascinates me for none of the reasons you think. Go has made several interesting design decisions:
I have a slight problem wherein every time I start up a game of NetHack, I completely lose touch with my surroundings for hours on end. Thankfully The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything and there’s a solution that allows communication with the outside world without breaking immersion: the mail daemon!
On how plummeting battery prices make 24/7 solar power a reality today.
Some thoughts in support of simple solutions.
We're spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else. The only way we were able to get the pricing that low was by signing a four-year contract. That contract expires this summer, June 30, so that's our departure date for the final leg of our cloud…
