5701
Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer
Like some of you, we have several kitchen appliances with integrated digital timers.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,970 posts.
5702
Hologram v0.7.0: Milestone release for Elixir-to-JavaScript porting initiative
Hologram v0.7.0: 49 contributors ported 150 Erlang functions, pushing runtime coverage from 34% to 96%. Plus enhancements, bug fixes, and infrastructure work.
5703
Against vibes: When is a generative model useful
Let's suppose I wanted to answer a question: is the tool X useful for the task Y. If I were scientific about this, I would analyze the properties of tool X and develop a model, and the task Y and the requirements for it and develop a model, and I would us...
5704
The real cost of random I/O
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
5705
MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
5706
March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
5707
Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display
The California Science Center has begun the complex process of moving components into place for space shuttle Endeavour’s awe-inspiring vertical display.
5708
Rubin Observatory's first LSST Camera release: 500k galaxies in the COSMOS field
A new image from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a spectacularly deep view into a famous region of sky known as the COSMOS field. Located in the constellation Sextans, COSMOS is one of the most observed patches of the Universe — and Rubin’s new image adds a powerful new view of this well-known cosmic landmark.
5709
ToothPaste
AES-256 Cross Platform Device Control.
5710
A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits (2021)
Transformer language models are an emerging technology that is gaining increasingly broad real-world use, for example in systems like GPT-3 , LaMDA , Codex , Meena , Gopher , and similar models. However, as these models scale, their open-endedness and high capacity creates an increasing scope for unexpected and…
5711
The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
5712
We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust
And lived to tell the tale.
5713
Formal Methods and the Future of Programming
I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.
5714
5715
Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does
A bit more than a year ago, we did something a bit weird. We took a few cans of spray paint and we went out on the street. Not to pain...
5716
Building SQLite with a small swarm
Yes, for a supported subset of SQL. To establish a baseline, I integrated the SQLLogicTest suite.
5717
Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed in a recent podcast discussion that it's "terrible" for everyday people to own DRAM that data centres can use.
5718
Nobody is coming to save your career
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
5719
Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used
I’m tired of this phrase and this simple way of thinking about tools. This blog post is a wandering train of thought on the topic of what tools are and why it matters to be even slightly more mature in how we think about them.
5720
What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?
MirrorCode is Epoch AI's benchmark for long-horizon coding: AI can reimplement entire programs end-to-end, with no access to the original source code.
5721
100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
5722
What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
5723
The Slow Death of the Power User
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read…
5724
I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
At first, I thought I was addicted to internet forums. Then Facebook appeared and soon after I discovered Reddit, Hacker News, 9GAG, Instagram and other form...
5725
$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
We analyzed 4 million IRS 990 filings to map where $3 trillion in U.S. nonprofit revenue actually flows. The data is public — nobody had compiled it.
5726
A curmudgeon tries a language server
I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…
5727
The Serial TTL connector we deserve
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
5728
5729
What is a product?
It is far too easy to create software these days, but what is the difference between a side project and a real product?
5730
The NX bit is not just about security
While I’m taking a short break from low-level programming, here’s a story by a friend of mine, Sonya, about debugging a seemingly impossible bug in ARM code. This bug hunting saga started several months ago. While developing a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM64 for postmarketOS, I hit a strange bug: if I enabled the…