2581
Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s c…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
2582
I can't pay rent because devs just don't care
Rent's due today, thank heavens I just got paid. I don't set up standing orders, got burned once with unarranged overdraft fees, that wasn't a good mont...
2583
Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate
A quick reference
2584
GPT-5 vs. Sonnet: Complex Agentic Coding
OpenAI released GPT-5 yesterday, promoting it as their best model yet for agentic coding.
2585
I avoid using LLMs as a publisher and writer
Disclaimer: I am a book publisher & I love technology.
2586
Haskelling My Python
Reimplementing Haskell lazy infinite lists using Python generators
2587
Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
I was expecting this to be pretty bad - but it actually came out quite nicely!
2588
IBM Patented Euler's 200 Year Old Math Technique for 'AI Interpretability'
IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent
2589
Tides are weirder than you think
Our world relies on the sea more than ever: 80% of goods traded worldwide move by ship. Today’s mariners take it for granted that they can get an accurate chart of the tides for any location on Ear…
2590
Poor man's bitemporal data system in SQLite and Clojure
On trying to mash up SQLite with ideas stolen from Accountants, Clojure, Datomic, XTDB, Rama, and Local-first-ers, to satisfy Henderson's Tenth Law. Viz., to make a sufficiently complicated data system containing an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a bitemporal database…
2591
The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience
Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…
2592
Pixel Art Tips for Programmers
Programmers are known to not have a strong suit for art related disciplines, pixel art is no exception.
2593
Writing my own dithering algorithm in Racket
My journey implementing a new dithering algorithm in the Racket programming language.
2594
Clojure: Realtime collaborative web apps without ClojureScript
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
2595
Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs
The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read…
2596
Hacker News – The Good Parts
The other day, my twelve-year-old daughter asked me what platform I spend most of my time on when I'm on my phone or computer. She intuitively noticed that ...
2597
I was wrong about robots.txt
Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was confident that I wanted to ban all the crawlers from my website. Turned out there was an unintended consequence that I did not account for. My LinkedIn posts…
2598
The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
2599
Yoke: Infrastructure as code, but actually
Infrastructure as code, but actually
2600
What the hell is a target triple?
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.
2601
Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable
A modest mathematical framing of language
2602
2603
Who does your assistant serve?
ChatGPT and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
2604
2605
The Limits of NTP Accuracy on Linux
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a…
2606
Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds
There's a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.
2607
Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi
AI, history, and Soviet sci-fi
2608
Checklists are hard, but still a good thing
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…
2609
Three AM 911 call, 9 AM salesman
A few days ago, the smoke alarms in my house went off at 3am, so we got up and took it seriously when we smelled smoke everywhere. But after 20 minutes of searching high and low, we couldn't find a source, so as a precaution, we called 911 to
2610
Believe the Checkbook
AI companies talk as if engineering is over. Their acquisitions say the opposite.