2491
Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google
a post from alan w. smith
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
2492
AI, Tools and Transformation
It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t
2493
Science Is Open Software
TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. Why do you care about (open source) software? - Everyone I spend a lot of my time working on software. I have been asked why software matters more times than I can…
2494
Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
The Dimensionality Problem
2495
Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
2496
Terry Pratchett's Study
This is not a replica of Terry Pratchett’s study. To do that, I would have needed pictures from every angle and exact measurements, so this is just a small part of a study, where Terry Pratchett might have felt at home, in scale 1:12. If you read “The Borrowers" as…
2497
I imported the full Linux kernel git history into pgit
I imported the entire Linux kernel git history into pgit's PostgreSQL-backed storage. 1,428,882 commits, 24.4 million file versions, 20 years of development. Here's what the kernel looks like when you can just ask.
2498
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver, by Carl Etnier.
2499
Curvature Beziers: Improving on a timeless recipe
Improving on a timeless recipe
2500
Open-source AI and open models reading list
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
2501
A Forth-inspired language for writing websites
I don't remember where the idea came from, but I decided that it would be cool if I could write websites using a stack-based language. Something like this: : h1 ( s -- ) "<h1>" emit . "</h1>" em…
2502
Playing with Vision Embeddings
Poking at the geometry of an image model's feature space.
2503
The USB Situation
I write this from the latest MacBook Pro. I've been running this as my primary machine for almost a month. When I'm not grinding out the latest soon-to-be-relea
2504
The compiler was supposed to end programming too
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. What the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, and my guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
2505
No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons . Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War…
2506
Less human AI agents, please
Nial – Knowledge work and artificial intelligence.
2507
Don't Roll Your Own
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
2508
Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
2509
SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
2510
Stop generating, start thinking
Instead of wanting to learn and improve as humans, and build better software, we’ve outsourced our mistakes to an unthinking algorithm.
2511
2512
The lost malloc()
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
2513
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
2514
Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux
McZee meets a penguin!
2515
Fooling around with encrypted reasoning blobs
Update August 11, 2026: A group of researchers from all over Europe were inspired by this post, and actually turned it into a real working attack! Check out their writeup and paper here. This is a …
2516
Learning the Integral of a Diffusion Model
A deep dive on flow maps.
2517
Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way
japanese verbs are awesome. you can take the dictionary form of a verb (for example, "taberu", to eat) and turn it into many forms: taberu ("eat"): tabemasu…
2518
How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
There is a popular idea that substantial wealth belongs mainly to entrepreneurs. We celebrate founders, investors and business owners so loudly that a career person can begin to believe that employ…
2519
The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
2520
I Don't Like Magic
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)