Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that…
For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size . In this post, I'll translate ...
One year ago, the Safe C++ proposal was made. The goal was to add a safe subset/context into C++ that would give strong guarantees (memory safety, type safety, …
The other day I wanted to look up a specific IBM PS/2 model, a circa 1992 PS/2 Server system. So I punched the model into Google, and got this:
Of course you want to design (and implement!) your own programming language! It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s empowering.
Discussing icon design, and commenting on some passages of Apple's Adopting Liquid Glass document.
The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it. We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful …
I retired from my IT career a couple of months ago after 43 years of commercial software product development and transitioned to the real…
"Correct" doesn't mean "correct" when correctly using "correct"
[UPDATE: Feb 8 2025] my amazing colleague Max Shen noticed a sign mistake in my derivation of the partial derivative of the log-harmonic function below.
Don't let AI erode your focus.
When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“ Multi-User Dungeons ” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet ). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows…
Taking the output of many dumb LLM search relevance judges and feeding the output to a decision tree to improve precision
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. Here's a glimpse of the clarity it provides:
Pain never felt this good
My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this…
My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
So far, we’ve only really touched on some of the fundamentals of reverse engineering with one game example, but this time we’re looking at something a bit different. Shenmue (1999) is widely known for its pursuit of realism and has remained an influential series to this day, with its third game releasing in 2019. This…
I’ve been hinting on X/Twitter about my use of the Daylight DC-1 as a programming environment, and after about a year of use, it’s time to write about it in longer form. This isn’t a full product review, but rather an experience report on coding in sunlight. It’s also about the Boox Tab Ultra – which has a different…
Discover how content-aware memory models, understanding flashcard semantics, will simplify the creation of future spaced repetition systems.
Perturbation and rescaling for efficient rendering of fractal images.
I know how to decode UTF-8 using bitmath and some LUTs (see https://github.com/skeeto/branchless-utf8 ), but if I want to to go from a codepoint to UTF-8, is there a way to do it without branches?
Learn how Linux containers are built from the ground up. Starting with the mount namespace and a root filesystem, see why PID, cgroup, UTS, and network namespaces naturally follow - and how this foundation makes concepts like bind mounts, volumes, and persistence in Docker or Kubernetes much easier to grasp.
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of ...
