Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?
I’ve spent roughly the last decade and some change as a software engineer, and recently decided to start a solo consultancy. I’m focused on helping SMEs sort out the messy back-office parts of the business: spreadsheet glue, brittle internal workflows, poor reporting, awkward integrations, backend/platform problems, and AI workflows that need to do real work […]
SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)
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Keep Pushing: We Get 10 More Days to Reform Section 702
In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight! They are holding out for, at a minimum, the requirement of an actual probable cause warrant for FBI access to information collected under the mass spying program known […]
Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon
tl;dr: on Apple Silicon, a WebAssembly module’s linear memory can be shared directly with the GPU: no copies, no serialization, no intermediate buffers. The CPU and GPU read and write the same physical bytes. End-to-end, it works: a Wasm guest fills a matrix in its linear memory, the GPU reads it, computes, writes back, and […]
Any Color You Like: NIST Scientists Create ’Any Wavelength’ Lasers
Lindell Williams (left) and Grant Brodnik align an optical fiber with the edge of an integrated photonics chip. Optical fibers act as pipes for light, enabling the light generated on these chips to be collected and routed off the chip for use in experiments and applications. Credit: R. Jacobson/NIST Computer chips that cram billions of […]
Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
Back in November last year, I started a new job at Intercom, and one of the first projects I got to work on was improving the Intercom monolith CI with some of my new colleagues. Interestingly, I never got around to talking about CI on this blog, even though I consider it to be one […]
Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out. As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs, it was pushed toward systematization — and Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on. Some concepts […]
College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore at Cornell University, laughs with classmates while using a typewriter for a German writing assignment on Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. The professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once a semester for her students to use. (AP Photo/Lauren Petracca) Students use typewriters to complete a writing assignment […]
Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war
Sixteen bets made $100,000 each accurately predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on 27 February. Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces. On 7 April, right before Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran, […]
Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2026
13 Apr 2026 9 min read Matthew S. Smith is a contributing editor for IEEE Spectrum and the former lead reviews editor at Digital Trends. IEEE Spectrum The capabilities of leading AI models continue to accelerate, and the largest AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are hurtling toward IPOs later this year. Yet resentment toward […]