1741
Harold and George Destroy the World
I have been thinking a lot lately about these two fellows. If you are not lucky enough to know them already, those are Harold and George from the Captain Underpants series of books (among others)…
1742
New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker
A recent U.S. college degree long meant lower unemployment than the average worker. That edge flipped in 2019, and the gap is now the widest on record.
1743
AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details…
1744
Everything old is new again: memory optimization
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full bl...
1745
Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
I always felt a little bad for the ghosts in Pac-Man. They patrol the maze, they corner the guy, and then he eats a glowing pellet and suddenly they're the ones running for their lives. So I built a small game where you finally get to play the other side.
1746
VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
1747
SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
1748
Generative art over the years
I’ve been making generative art on and off since 2016. It started as a programming exercise and slowly turned into something more personal as I discovered…
1749
Running MicroVMs in Proxmox VE, the Easy Way
I’ve been running a mixed Proxmox cluster for years – four nodes of wildly different capability, from an Atom x5-Z8350 with 2 GB of RAM (a z83ii, currently ...
1750
Hand Drawn QR Codes (2025)
I really like QR codes. Recently I purchased a new sticky-note-like pad from a new local stationery store in Minneapolis. The sheets have a 10x10 grid and 2x10 grid. I knew what I wanted to...
1751
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
1752
It's a shame what's happened to radio
Why I wouldn't enjoy returning to radio as a disk jockey.
1753
They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
1754
Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Yes, there really was a smoking room on the Hindenburg… even though the zeppelin was inflated with 7 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen...
1755
AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
Does AI-assisted cognition threaten human development? Explore the risks of AI-assisted thinking and learn strategies to use AI tools without freezing your critical thinking.
1756
Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
KO | EN | Discussions on HN I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009. The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.6...
1757
Use boring languages with LLMs
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
1758
Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
1759
Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
A programmer's text editor is their castle
1760
Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
1991: T and P of ChatGPT, distillation, deep residual learning, LSTM, GAN
1761
Training AI to Paint with Code
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
1762
Chopping up books when they're physically too big
Matt Kirkland is a designer. He probably reads too much.
1763
Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
A complete crawl of every restored link from 2009 to 2014 found that 76.7% no longer return a loading page.
1764
Do not apologize for replying late to my email
Do not apologize for replying late to my email par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
1765
The End of Eleventy
Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same …
1766
Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
How NAT broke the concept of an internet connection
1767
Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting for AI tools is usually X, viral GitHub repositories and Hacker News. One of these tells I’ve been seeing a lot lately is skills like I have ADHD and Agents.md instructions such as giving outputs in only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
1768
The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
1769
1770
A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…