Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,962 posts.
In 2005 Google showed off Google Maps, which lets you drag the map around instead of reloading the page like MapQuest and others used. That’s the feature that got everyone’s attention. But what got my attention was a feature they added in 2007 where you could drag the start/end points on a route [1] , and it would…
This policy is illogical and will harm Americans, their employees, employers, and family members. It will drive talented people to other countries and make America a less competitive place for business.
Let’s Explore a Little Math
Public Health professor discusses how ultra-processed foods are a direct legacy of the tobacco industry, and are responsible for a dramatic rise in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases across the country.
Why the productivity gains from AI are still small.
Qwen3.8 27B benchmarked on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra: Ollama and llama.cpp numbers, the 1-bit quant tested, RAM math, and the hardware that actually fits.
Update: I noticed that the post appeared on Hacker News. It got more publicity than I thought it would. But maybe it's a good thing. It shows that there is an increased interest in NetBSD. And I suppose it's in part because people are looking for AI-free alternatives and there aren't many options out there.
An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable to document…
Thoughts on the new technical report from AMÁLIA: The Open Source LLM for European Portuguese
From imperative chaos to nix-darwin
New metrics of AI usage provide a rich portrait of interactions with Claude in November 2025, just prior to the release of Opus 4.5.
Maybe you’re a Claude code/codex user diligently avoiding uploading personal data to LLM providers. Is it possible that the most valuable information isn’t your data- but the metadata about your sessions? The intuitions you apply in coming up with ways to coax the ai into solving problems might actually be special…
I made a programming language. I'm sorry.
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…
We're announcing protobuf-py, a complete, 100% conformant Protobuf runtime for Python that feels like Python and matches the performance of Google's C engine on real workloads.
Tailscale's CEO talks about outages: what they are, why they happen, and how Tailscale is making them smaller and less frequent.
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship. | Good Bad ISPs
I spend a lot of time developing and teaching people about Clojure's open source tools for working with data. Almost everybody who wants to use Clojure…
How a Single Function Call Gates Safety Alignment in Gemma, Qwen, and Other Open-Source LLMs
Compare 153 autonomous runs from 18 frontier models on the nanoGPT optimizer speedrun.
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
Why two identical VMs on the same host can perform 20% differently — and what NUMA topology in Xen-based virtualization actually costs you.
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic...
I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
