1981
America has a tungsten problem
The US will need a lot more tungsten in the future. Where will it come from?
1982
Stopping the smart TV from being used against you
Smart TVs are everywhere! But who is the master? Amid the electronics boom driven by A.I., one piece of electronics has remained almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these devi
1983
CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vs. rootless containers
In the previous post about SELinux MCS and GitLab runners, I briefly mentioned CVE-2026-31431 (“Copy Fail”) as a motivating example for per-job VM isolation. After that post went out I spent the weekend setting up a lab to actually run the exploit, trace it at the syscall level, and verify that the rootless Podman…
1984
Alternate clock designs and time systems
A day has 24 hours in it. That's 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. If you wonder why Americans don't understand the need for using the metric system then ask yourself why you use this inconsistent time measurement system.
1985
Running Your Own AS: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing
How I obtained my own AS number and IPv6 prefix, set up a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, and built a tunnel overlay to bring globally routable addresses to servers that already have provider-assigned...
1986
Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch
In November, my friend and fellow Recurser, Frank , picked up an arcade machine for the Recurse Center . We call it the RCade. He wanted to leave the original CRT in - which I think is a great choice! - and drove it off of a Raspberry Pi. Eventually we wanted to move to a more powerful computer, but we needed a way to…
1987
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The idea is simple: If there’s a fire in a tall building that blocks the main stairwell, people need an alternative way to evacuate, preferably one that is somewhat protected or at least far away from where the fire is happening
1988
Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
OR: The Great Switcheroo
1989
Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
1990
Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month
My homepage now runs on OpenBSD with httpd(8) and Let's Encrypt via acme-client(1) . I previously hosted it on GitHub Pages and then eventually moved to Cloudflare Pages because both options were free and easy. Free and easy is cool, and I understand that writing software full-time leaves us wanting absolutely nothing…
1991
Lean now ships with verified kernels
Leonardo de Moura — Creator of Lean and Z3
1992
MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
1993
What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] New York City is unlike any other city in the United States. It’s the most densely populated area in the country by far, absolutely packed with buildings, business, homes, and people. But for all that you can see walking the str
1994
How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
1995
The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
1996
How to make Firefox builds 17% faster
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
1997
Allow babywearing carriers on planes
The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered"…
1998
1999
The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research. I chose DeepSeek V4 because I know it is cheap, but seeing it’s pricing next to Anthropic and OpenAI ‘frontier’ models is crazy. Nearly a 50x price increase based on tokens alone, let alone how much pondering any of their models might fall into (using…
2000
A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
2001
The Web Is More Than Enough
Web browsers enable incredibly rich app development—and that’s radically easier than it used to be.
2002
How I use Obsidian (2023)
My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.
2003
The Decoherence Trap
Of all the forms of tech debt, decoherence is the worst. It compounds exponentially with a system's rate of change, and AI is now producing it faster than ever, leading us deeper and deeper into the abyss...
2004
5NF and Database Design
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…
2005
I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)
Software is now a commodity thanks to Claude Code. So the next step is obviously hardware. I spent the last 6 months on building a hardware startup, which was fucking hard.
2006
Girls just wanna have fast MPMC queues with bounded waiting
Disclaimer: An earlier version of this post claimed the structure is wait-free, this is incorrect. Being wait-free requires that failure or suspension of any thread can’t cause failure or suspension of another thread. This queue in fact does not fulfill that requirement. The main section which discusses the wait…
2007
Good CTE, Bad CTE
The planner treats CTEs very differently depending on how you write them. Here's what happens under the hood, version by version, through PostgreSQL 18.
2008
Going Full Time on Open Source
Why I left Figma to work full-time on open source, and how I plan to make the work sustainable.
2009
Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
AI plays well at complex strategy games with uncertainty and incomplete information.
2010
The Future of AI Software Development
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases