Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,937 posts.
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world. In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend…
Today, we’re changing our name from TransferWise to Wise. Our customers now need us for more than money transfers. Sending, spending, and receiving money...
We must look to the past — to the World's Fairs — to build the future.
Last week, Chandler Carruth announced Carbon, a potential C++ replacement they’ve been working on for the past two years. It has the usual cool features you expect from a modern language: useful generics, compile-time interfaces/traits/concepts, modules, etc. – but the thing I’m most excited about is a tiny detail…
Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…
Unum builds the Search, Storage, and Networking engines powering the modern data stack. Deployed on 100M+ devices, our technology serves DBMS unicorns and frontier AI labs.
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…
New integration enables software teams to connect their code on GitHub.com to their projects on Jira Software Cloud
We're excited to announce a contribution to improving privacy for everyone on the Internet. Encrypted Client Hello, a new standard that prevents networks from snooping on which websites a user is visiting, is now available on all Cloudflare plans.
Understand how using UUIDs as primary keys can affect PostgreSQL performance, and how to tweak your index to avoid UUID performance pitfalls.
Last week, we published CVE-2025-29927 and patched a critical severity vulnerability in Next.js. Here’s our post-incident analysis and next steps.
Paul Graham published a simplified version of his essay on income inequality . Here's my simplified response: It is true that many social...
The other day I was implementing multi-threaded stat() calls in bfs . When I ran some benchmarks, I saw something that made my heart skip a beat:
Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first…
So it’s borderline useless for all but the simplest use cases, and even there it does a very subpar job. I’d like to have an inline image every now and then, or organize things in some multi-column layouts or the like, or a table. 19th century newspapers could do this, and if your technology can’t emulate typography…
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, gave an interesting talk at NDSS 2024 titled "AI, Encryption, and the Sins of the 90s".
Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International. The International is an unbelievably huge…
Explore the Qt Blog for the latest insights on e.g. Qt Creator, your go-to source for cross-platform development tips and updates.
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?
Codon is a new tool that compiles Python code to run it more efficiently and effectively while allowing for customization and adaptation to various domains.
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
