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Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
My Plasma task switcher was a second too slow, so I built - and shipped - my own in Zig, without actually knowing Zig, using AI tools.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,968 posts.
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Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors, pt. 1 (2013)
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
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SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.
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ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine
My complete guide for setting up the ASRock BC-250. You can’t beat its price for performance, and it’s perfect for those who love tinkering with projects.
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Ratchets in software development (2021)
So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eve...
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Flat Chair by Sara Paculdo
Innovative Housewares This page : SMART IRON | FRISPER | FLAT CHAIR PROJECT | FIRST AID WITH A FACE OLISO is a small design firm focused on delivering inventive solutions to "change your home and lifestyle." As the sole industrial designer at the time, Sara worked with engineering, marketing
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Aesthetics of single threading
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
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Six (and a half) intuitions for KL divergence
KL-divergence is a topic which crops up in a ton of different places in information theory and machine learning, so it's important to understand well. Unfortunately, it has some properties which seem confusing at a first pass (e.g. it isn't symmetric like we would expect from most distance measures, and it can be…
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Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)
I was inspired by Tom Scott’s excellent video and links here where he talks about a particular type of “Inogon” light used to guide ships through channels or harbours. The patent …
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Superhuman AI Exfiltrates Emails
Superhuman AI was able to exfiltrate sensitive emails from user accounts - without the user even being aware. This vulnerability was rapidly remediated by the Superhuman team.
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C++26: The New Debugging Header
If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else…
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My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping
On Friday, I did a Reddit AMA with the r/WebScrapingInsider subreddit about the law of web scraping. You can see the entire discussion here. I posted an introduction to the AMA, which I am sharing here: __ Hi everyone, and...
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Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)
In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places , I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel .
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Scaling NumPy on Free-Threaded Python
A recap on the work done in NumPy and CPython to make multi-threaded NumPy workloads scale on the free-threaded build of CPython.
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VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
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Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells
SLAC scientists observed an immune signaling complex forming inside cells for the first time, revealing insights that could guide new treatments.
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Build Yourself Flowers
Living and working in a world of generated code.
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Bidirectional charging during grid outages
David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be great, and seems like the obvious way for it to work: when the grid goes down the panels can charge the car when it's…
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C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Word sizes, strange machines, and why <strong>int</strong> was never meant to mean 32 bits. C's flexible integer types were how the language achieved portability in a world of 12, 18, 36, and 60-bit computers.
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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
TL;DR: Gas Town and Beads have both released version 1.0.0 today. Enjoy!
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Apple capped engineers at a $200 daily AI budget
The world's richest company is suddenly rationing compute for its own builders.
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window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world
Chrome introduced a new API, window.showDirectoryPicker() that allows the user to grant access to a directory on their computer and allow a website to read/write everything inside.
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Will Claude Code ruin our team?
AI coding is blurring the lines between engineers, PMs, and designers. In the short-term, it's going to cause havoc. What happens long-term?
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Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often
Across 654 products in 19 categories, Reddit owners bring up reliability and support in 13% of their opinions, YouTube reviewers in 7%. On apps, 71% of owner opinions are negative. Data to download.
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Average is all you need
LLMs will make more of your average stuff. And that's OK. Here's how average SQL beats fancy attribution models when your agent writes the queries.
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Are we tired of social media? (2025)
I've been asking this question to myself a few times now. When ...