Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 550 posts.
Aggressive bots ruined my weekend
The web-scraping arm race continues
Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI
We're excited to announce an enhancement to Gemini CLI that makes your workflow more powerful a...
Solving Wordle with uv's dependency resolver
mildbyte.xyz
Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0
Trombone emoji skanking it's way into our hearts …
How to Store Data on Paper?
How to print my voice? How to put music on paper? How to print an executable program? All this boils down to storing digital data on paper. This is also called paper data storage . Arrived in this domain from poetry, I’ve been investigating the area for some time. Here is what I found.
Rethinking CLI interfaces for AI
We need to augment our command line tools and design APIs so they can be better used by LLM Agents. The designs are inadequate for LLMs as they are now – especially if you're constrained by the tiny context windows available with local models.
Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python (2018)
Behind the scenes blog of pretix, your friendly ticketing system from next door.
How Not to Buy a SSD
sugar, spice, and everything not nice
Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
What the hell is going on with our brains? It seems like the algorithms have already taken over and the scientific literature is catching up with
I used standard Emacs extension-points to extend org-mode
Recently I read this beginners guide to extend Emacs. The guide is perfect for starting out with elisp and it shows a lot of care in teaching how to interact with Emacs.
The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves
3D printing and miniatures as a case study in how tech misses what users actually want
The Socratic Journal Method: A Simple Journaling Method That Works
Journaling doesn’t need to be a chore. In this post, I share The Socratic Journal Method, my simple twist on journaling that turns blank pages into meaningful conversations. It’s a method designed to help you reflect, stay consistent, and actually enjoy the process.
Common mistakes in architecture diagrams (2020)
A rundown of seven common mistakes is system architecture diagrams and how to fix them
Test, don't just verify
AI-assisted mechnical proving companies are raising funds on billion dollar valuations , new people are trying proof assistants, overwhelmingly Lean, at unprecedented rates. Models achieve fascinating results in competitions previously considered to contain some of the hardest problems in the world, such as IMO, ICPC…
USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.
Dagger: A shell for the container age
Build powerful software environments and containerized operations from modular components and simple functions. Perfect for complex software delivery and AI agents. Built by the creators of Docker.
Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates
Using TypeScript and some DMV API digging, I chased down and claimed one of the rarest available license plate combinations.
Java 25's new CPU-Time Profiler
Learn all about Java 25's new CPU-time profiler and why it matters in this weeks blog post from the creator himself.
An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio
Explore the upgraded Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro, agentic tools, and enhanced multimodal capabilities for developers to build sophisticated AI apps.
Tau² benchmark: How a prompt rewrite boosted GPT-5-mini by 22%
We expected small models to be fast, but our benchmarks revealed a common reliability trap. Here’s our deep dive on finding and fixing it.
My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)
TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. As a result, a plethora of font…
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable. Of course there are alternatives, specifically bad ones...
The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers
Having spent a couple of decades in the Linux world, I have always had an interest in Linux desktop environments and how they are themed. I would often come across a post on /r/unixporn that inspired me to try to customize the look and feel of my desktop environment. So I would install Xfce, LXQt or Sway and try to…
The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.