Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,965 posts.
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it given that the…
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here .
In Rust, one of the most common ways to implement core traits (like Debug , Display , and Clone ) is to #[derive(...)] them, e.g.:
A beginner's exploration of the many layers of Common Lisp development environments.
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
You might already know that atoms are mostly empty space. Physical size behaves a bit weirdly at the atomic scale, but essentially the radius of an atom’s nucleus is tens of thousands of times smal…
A story of sharp edges, segfaults, and standards
Two services running on the same machine. One of them opens a listening TCP socket bound to localhost, the other one connects to that. They exchange data. Every now and then , the service that initiated the connection gets an ECONNRESET while reading data from the socket -- but no other errors show up in the logs, no…
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
With the latest release of corecrypto, we’re publishing our implementations of quantum-secure ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms, along with the mathematical proofs we built to assure they are faithful to the FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 specifications. To advance the state of the art for assuring critical software, we're also…
As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to “Briefly …
We usually learn that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 kilobytes, etc. But is this true or a kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
From 15 March 2026, CAs must validate DNSSEC on CAA lookups and ACME checks. I've run DNSSEC for 14 years; see if your registrar supports it.
Intel ushers in the next generation of AI PCs with exceptional performance, graphics and battery life; available this month
a guide to interactive rebasing.
ernesernesto dev blog
I hated picking berries as a teenager. Now the solitude it gives me is something I plan my whole summer around.
Earlier this year we published a puzzle that handed you a complete neural network and asked you to figure out what it did. The response was great, so we’ve made another one! This time, we’re going much deeper down the tech stack.
There is a misunderstanding about software engineering that AI is making increasingly visible: we tend to confuse writing code with building software.
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
Like many developers, I find myself more and more using AI agents to help with software development. I currently use Claude Code, the co...
I built an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory.
Most of the discourse about the environmental impact of LLM use focuses on a ‘median query.’ What about a Claude Code session?
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about scaffolding and languages for managing systems of LLMs coordinating with each other — new programming languages might be the ideal solution for this area.
Learn what it means to conform to the Python typing spec, why it matters, and the conformance status of each type checker including Pyrefly, Ty, Pyright and Mypy.
When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve…
Preview, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, Round 4, Laguna Seca
After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even…
