Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,853 posts.
Since version 56, Firefox has had a new character encoding conversion library called encoding_rs. It is written in Rust and replaced the old C++ character encoding conversion library called uconv that dated from early 1999. Initially, all the callers of the character encoding conversion library were C++ code, so the…
How coding models respond when familiar engineering tasks ask for something different.
Demoscene is the art of pushing computers to perform tasks they weren’t designed to handle. One recurring theme in demoscene is the shadow-art animation “Bad Apple!!”. We’ve played it on the Commodore 64, Vectrex (a unique game console utilizing only vector graphics), Impulse Tracker, and even exploited Super Mario…
Great improvement from my previous tile selection. I was actually still using the same tile selection code that I wrote way back in January when this started. Now there's a nice editor menu with tabs and stuff. The filters at the top and the sorting things don't work yet. All in good time.
What the NYT Cancel Culture Editorial Got Wrong, And What It Got Right
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O'Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer
Kids growing up in close-knit communities where the social ties are thick are more protected from the harms of the phone-based childhood.
Is your vibe-coded app a Crapject or a Gift?
Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist . . . Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, “We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the…
[Download for PDF/printable version of this article] When I started looking into this subject, I predicted a person’s physical attractiveness would only have minor advantages. I was wrong. In fact, I was so wrong, that in one study, the effects of physical attractiveness on judges were so influ
Of the biggest tech companies, only Apple has not executed major job cuts. But why is this, and can we now expect it to follow suit by shedding workers?
There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don't realize at all how big it is.
Updated 10/25
Happy 6th birthday, Go!
After being left for dead, SQL is making a comeback and the NoSQL vs. SQL debate is stronger than ever. Why? And how will it impact the data community?
Two days at PDX DevOpsDays, a gathering of system administrators who use version control, and write a lot of YAML.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I…
There's a moment in the movie Good Will Hunting which perfectly summarizes all the problems with AI slop and online noise and infinite advice content. Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sitting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. I live here, so I know it well. The area
Learn how to build with Gemma 3n, a mobile-first architecture, MatFormer technology, Per-Layer Embeddings, and new audio and vision encoders.
I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually imp
macOS GPU clock heuristics don't recognize real-time audio work, and my spin loop workaround fails on Pro and Max chips. I need the Metal team's help.
