Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,817 posts.
I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code
(Not an anti-AI post — Copilot is great, I use it all the time.)
Regex for Noobs – An Illustrated Guide
This blog post is an illustrated guide to regex and aims to provide a gentle introduction for people who never have fiddled with regex, want to, but are kind of intimidated by the whole thing.
What every computer science major should know (2011)
Given the expansive growth in the field, it's become challenging to discern what belongs in a modern computer science degree.
Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite
Google is releasing updated Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite preview models with improved quality, speed, and efficiency.
Android: I don't need your permission
Permissions on Android are tricky to get right from a user perspective. Usually you only want to do something minor and innocuous (pre-fill a form with a contact's info) but the actual permission you have to request gives you much more power than necessary (access to ALL contact
LLM from scratch, part 28 – training a base model from scratch on an RTX 3090
I felt like it should be possible to train a GPT-2 small level model on my own hardware using modern tools and open datasets from scratch. It was!
Things Every Hacker Once Knew
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
2048 Numberwang
Join the numbers and get Numberwang! Careful: this game is extremely addictive!
Writing Python like it's Rust
You can check out a YouTube recording of a talk based on this blog post.
Kotlin Is Better
I've also ended up using Emacs along side Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm & Webstorm). It is an odd combo but it works great. Emacs for mind-control level text editing, and the IDE works great for mouse-oriented poking around and small edits.
Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
Rust 2018 is here, but what is it?
Starting today, the Rust 2018 edition is in its first release. With this edition, we’ve focused on making Rust developers as productive as they can be. Most of the language ...
Repl.it 1.0: IDE that Grows from Playgrounds to Fullstack Apps
At Repl.it we come to work every day to explore a single idea—what if programming just worked? What if instead of fiddling around with packages, configurations, and mismatching versions, you just open your IDE and start coding. What if developers can go from an idea to coding and shipping software with no time in…
What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
The notion of a "senior" developer is extremely subjective. How can we define it better?
What typing ^D does on Unix (2009)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
ClojureScript 1.7: ClojureScript can compile itself
I’ve been enamoured with languages in the Lisp family ever since I first encountered The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs now more than a decade ago. At the time I was disappointed that such beautiful systems found so little use in day to day programming. Lisp seemed both deeply pragmatic (Objects!)…
Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
Yesterday Andres Freund emailed oss-security@ informing the community of the discovery of a backdoor in xz/liblzma, which affected OpenSSH server (huge respect for noticing and investigating this). Andres' email is an amazing summary of the whole drama, so I'll skip that. While admittedly most juicy and interesting…
Cool, but obscure Unix tools
A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure -- I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Use your operating system's package manager to install…
Principles of Rich Web Applications
7 actionable principles for websites that want to make use of JavaScript to control their UI and deliver the best performance
Horrible edge cases when dealing with music
Personal blog of Julien (jvoisin) Voisin