5071
There is no posttraining data commons
The LLM revolution ran on a pretraining commons that humanity built for other reasons. Posttraining consumes tasks, not documents, and no such commons exists. If the open models community wants...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,964 posts.
5072
The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs
Who is the Assistant? We investigate the character that most modern language models inhabit when interacting with users.
5073
"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything"
A blog about software craft and quality
5074
I Accidentally Started a Small Business Three Weeks Ago
My Happiest, Most Grounded Distraction
5075
All 23-Bit Still Lifes Are Glider Constructible
In the Game of Life, which still lifes can be produced by crashing gliders together? We’ve known for a few years that the answer cannot be “all of them”, because in 2022 Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo found a patch of still life that, if it exists in the universe, must have existed since the beginning of time. And so…
5076
The Document Foundation ejects its core developers
Update 2026-04-07 Update: 2026-04-11 Update: 2026-04-17 Let’s kick the developers out! In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice…
5077
Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
Look, I really didn’t want to like Duet. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and it annoys me when they do things better than the competition. But they have done it again.
5078
Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Every productivity wave since the PC made work faster and piled on more of it, so companies gained more than workers did. AI does the work itself, which is why this one could land differently.
5079
C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
5080
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Confessions of a naive hamster: why the smartest people in the room keep missing that intelligence is often not the main bottleneck in the real world
5081
Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat
My thesis on the AI-first society and the future of software
5082
NixOS 26.05
Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems.
5083
Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
5084
An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review
I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi which not only requires expensive Mac hardware but also slowed down in the past few years.
5085
The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
5086
Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.
5087
Life is too short for a slow terminal
I do all my work in the terminal, so it has to be quick. How my zsh starts in 30 milliseconds without a framework, and how to measure where your own shell spends its time.
5088
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.
5089
Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
5090
Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
5091
I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task
I've been testing a simple prompt with different model and harness combinations to work out which one produces best results. I do this in /goal mode.
5092
Ok, but does it scale?
This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer. Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is…
5093
Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models
After a long day of exhausting conversations about Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography, random jackasses trying to play gotcha with endpoint attacks against end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, and me…
5094
Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
5095
Stroustrup's Rule (2024)
Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax.
5096
Engineering for Bounded Cognition
The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
5097
Pandas Exercises for Data Analysis (Interactive)
101 interactive pandas exercises with solutions. Edit and run every code block directly in your browser — no installation needed.
5098
Discovery of Cold War-era rare Eastern Bloc computers in a German hangar
In 2006, CHM curators traveled to Germany to follow a lead on an abandoned collection of historical computing artifacts. In a three-story warehouse, they found a real-world timeline of computing history. After days of exploring and assessing, they brought back nearly 2,000 items for the permanent collection.
5099
The simple elegance of the integrated timing belt loopback fastener
I’ve recently been working on a mechatronics project that involves constructing an X-Y cartesian motion system. I opted to use stepper motors to drive each axis, and timing belts and pulleys for translating the rotational torque of the steppers into linear motion. The timing belts need to be anchored to the component…
5100
Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia
use WASD + Mouse or tap on the screen to walk around :) Amulet of St. Michael in Kyiv, Ukraine (reconstructed with GaussianSplatting.jl, ~6M Gaussians)