Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,188 posts.
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they
Technical Debt is a metaphor for the consequences of cruft. You either have to accept a drag on further features (paying interest) or fix the software (paying the principal)
A plea for us to get back to building websites that can do normal website things.
Tutorial for tying the Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot, in which the laces are formed into two loops, both of which are passed through the “hole” in the middle.
Most of us last saw calculus in school, but derivatives are a critical part of machine learning, particularly deep neural networks, which are trained by optimizing a loss function. This article is an attempt to explain all the matrix calculus you need in order to understand the training of deep neural networks. We…
Hack the text output of Claude Code to make life a little bit sillier.
Viva.com, one of Europe's largest payment processors, sends verification emails without a Message-ID header — a requirement of RFC 5322 since 2008. Google Workspace rejects them outright. Their support team's response to my detailed bug report: your account has a verified email, so there's no problem.
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
Last year, I posted a series of articles about a purported “breach” at Ubiquiti. My sole source for that reporting was the person who has since been indicted by federal prosecutors for his alleged wrongdoing – which includes providing false information to the press.
My mate Lars Klint shared this tweet the other day: > Your password is not unique. pic.twitter.com/ga4GwxtzrQ [https://t.co/ga4GwxtzrQ] — Lars Klint (@larsklint) April 16, 2017 [https://twitter.com/larsklint/status/853507749488975873] Naturally, I passed it on [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/853517036131041280]…
If you teach or present with an iPad, avoid iPadOS 27.
Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust . Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is…
AI, science, education, & ethics
I was about to post about how nice the last 10 months of OpenFreeMap have been. The architecture has really proven itself to be great, Cloudflare has agreed to sponsor the bandwidth, Hetzner servers are super stable as always, serving tiles
Git Is Simpler Than You Think It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award. I made the...
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026608 points963 commentscited by 7History & Retro Computing details
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
In Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner made the following claim: Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on …
A timeline of founding a company in Germany: €11,800 spent, two companies registered, 203 days to a VAT ID, and a registration nobody mentioned.
Becoming the worst best chess player in the world
I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/distributed-architecture-concepts-i-have-learned-while-building-payments-systems/] , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs…
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
Earlier this year, I lost the ability to use a keyboard and mouse for extended periods. Fortunately, this wasn't as catastrophic as it sounds! This article chronicles my experience using adaptive tools like dictation and eye-tracking as my primary mechanisms for writing code.
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This site is hosted with Cloudflare Pages and I'm really happy with it. When I explored how to create a site like mine in 2025, I wondered why there's an abundance of good, free hosting these days. Years ago, you'd have to pay for hosting,…
