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Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)
tar.gz files seem to include extra files starting with ._. When these are extracted on Linux, a bunch of errors are displayed.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 967 posts.
632
Cord: Coordinating Trees of AI Agents
AI agents are good at doing one thing at a time. Give Claude a focused task and it performs. But real work isn’t one task. It’s a tree of tasks with dependencies, parallelism, and context that needs to flow between them.
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I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip
I've always had a fascination with simpler and low power computing. This lead me to run Photoshop on a 60 pence computer chip and it amazes me that this is possible.
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Synthesis is harder than analysis
Over the years, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists have developed various calculi. If you have a background in computer science, you’ve likely heard of the lambda calculus, a m…
635
Sourcehut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html)
A wormable vulnerability allowed anyone able to inject text in a build log on builds.sr.ht (or other instances) to take over accounts who viewed them
636
I changed my license
In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.
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How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing
A false dichotomy that hides the real request
638
So, you want to chunk really fast?
How we built memchunk - a blazing fast text chunking library using SIMD and memchr for RAG pipelines
639
Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools
Test-case reducers are less well known than they should be, and those who are aware of them don’t always realise the variety of ways we can use – perhaps even abuse! – them. In this post, I’m going to explore some of the things I’ve learnt while using these wonderful tools. I’ll start at the basics, because the idea…
640
IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.
641
Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick
The following post involves far too much discussion of the XOR swap trick. If XOR itself is unfamiliar, I have written a gentler introduction to it .
642
The case of the 9 bit AES key
Several PDF implementations advertise AES-256, but generate the 256-bit key from either a very small state space, or from insecure random sources.
643
Fancy Curl Sites
So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands!
644
LLMs are not superhuman at reading and writing neural network weights
A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra…
645
Needed 1+1, built a functional programming language
A deep dive into converting a simple arithmetic expression into a binary tree, leading to a custom language in C.
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Vibecoding #2
I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don't expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it's only proper if I write one.
648
Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
649
I hate you Microsoft
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
650
Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism. I read a lot of this textbook, got my fill, and probably won’t read more of it in the near future so wanted to write this…
651
Benchmark in Milliseconds
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
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What years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents
Python and JavaScript/TypeScript AI frameworks are reinventing what telecom solved in 1986. What 40 years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents.
653
PageRank explained
Picture this, the year is 1996. You find yourself frustrated with the incumbent search engines like AltaVista, which primarily does a content-based search (it'll give you an article on "Hotels for Chickens" if you search "Hotels" because the word matches). There's gotta be a better way, right? Well, in hindsight, of…
654
Dealing with abandonware (2024)
reverse engineering, abandonware
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Ten lines of code that changed my world
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
656
Patching my guitar amp's firmware
I’m having a lot of fun with reverse engineering lately, so when I was looking over the service manual for my guitar amp, a Yamaha THR10c, and saw references to a UART header in the schematic, I got excited. I wondered if anything cool was hiding in there. Next to it was a JTAG header. I knew next to nothing about…
657
Working with Git Worktrees in Magit
I’ll admit that until fairly recently I had no idea git worktrees existed. They’ve been part of git for a decade1 and I never once needed them. Feature branches did the job just fine - create a branch, do the work, merge it, delete it, and start over. What finally introduced me to worktrees was, of all things, AI…
658
LLM Neuroanatomy II: Modern LLM Hacking and Hints of a Universal Language?
In Part 1, I described how duplicating a block of seven middle layers in Qwen2-72B — no weight changes, no training — produced the #1 model on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard. The method, which I called RYS (Repeat Your Self), was discovered using nothing but hard math probes and EQ-Bench on a pair of RTX 4090s.
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Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory
You can go far without writing TLA+ syntax now, but you still need to understand temporal logic.
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SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads
A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.