1531
this css proves me human
Posts on software engineering – engineering culture, system legibility, and performance.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,943 posts.
1532
Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
Researchers analyzed samples of Utahns' hair going back a century to document a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations.
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UK media fails to disclose defence sector links in nearly 60% of cases
Here AOAV finds that UK media outlets frequently present retired senior military figures as independent defence experts without disclosing their commercial ties to defence, security, intelligence, and technology industries, potentially obscuring conflicts of interest in public debates over war and military spending.
1535
OAuth for all
Self-Managed OAuth is now available to all developers on Cloudflare. Here's how we executed a zero-downtime migration of our core OAuth engine to make it happen.
1536
My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day. I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.
1537
Missile defense is NP-complete
Exploring the Weapon-Target Assignment problem: how missile defense connects to NP-completeness, SSPK probability calculations, and how saturation attacks exploit computational limits.
1538
You are not your job
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
1539
I made my own Git
Personal home page of Tony
1540
4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)
For the past couple years, I have transported my 'working set' of video and project data to and from work on an external Thunderbolt NVMe SSD. But it's always been slow when I do the sync. In a typical day, I may generate a new project folder with 500-1000 individual files, and dozens of them may be 1-10 GB in size…
1541
How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
1542
My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
1543
Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2026!
1544
Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
I like supporting local businesses but it's so disheartening to see the increasing use of genAI in their branding/marketing/etc. Yuck yuck YUCK!!!
1545
Helium is hard to replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
1546
Hello, me. It's been a while
Wow. It’s been over fourteen years since the last time I wrote a post on this blog. In those fourteen years, the world has changed, and so have I. So this isn't going to be a technical post, it's going to be personal. One of those subtle changes that quietly crept into my life over
1547
Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
Last year, Canada's Bill C-2 was so bad it didn’t even make it to committee because of the backlash from the privacy community. Now, the spring’s worst sequel, Bill C-22, aka The Lawful Access Act, is trying it again.
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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
1549
A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
1550
A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
SSH port forwarding explained in a clean and visual way. How to use local and remote port forwarding. What sshd settings may need to be adjusted. How to memorize the right flags.
1551
An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re…
1552
Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild
The Stable channel has been updated to 145.0.7632.75/76 for Windows/Mac and 145.0.7632.75 for Linux, which will roll out over the coming d...
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Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers
A technique for accurate text and numbers in AI-generated images: generate the layout deterministically, then ask the image model to paint on top.
1554
S3 Files
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
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The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
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The AI Aesthetic
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of…
1557
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.
1558
Y Combinator's Stake in OpenAI (0.6%?)
The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference.
1559
AI is dramatically accelerating AI research
If acceleration compounds, the naive extrapolation implies superintelligence within a year
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I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
I love networking, a lot. So much so that I've run my own ISP since 2024, complete with its own ASN, IPv4/6 address space, fiber optics, etc. However, do this and you quickly realize how reliant you still remain on central service providers. The internet is a mesh,