MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Louis Mosley, head of Palantir Technologies UK. Graphic: the Nerve Palantir, the US AI surveillance and security firm with hundreds of millions of pounds in UK government contracts, poses “a national security threat to the UK”, according to two anonymous high-level sources working with the Ministry of Defence. The […]
Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies
Abstract Introduction: While corruption exists in both democracies and autocracies, its social consequences may differ fundamentally across regime types. Democratic norms of equality and impartiality make trust highly sensitive to institutional failure. We theorize two mechanisms—normative amplification and representative contagion—by which corruption erodes trust more in democracies. In democracies, corruption violates core fairness norms and […]
I Love FreeBSD
When I first laid eyes on the FreeBSD Handbook, back in 2002, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Six years of Linux, a relationship I’ve written about elsewhere, across various distributions, had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. Here was an […]
Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code
2026-03-16 I’ve been wondering what it would take for me to use unreviewed AI-generated code in a production setting. To that end, I ran an experiment that has changed my mindset from ”I must always review AI-generated code” to ”I must always verify AI-generated code.” By ”review” I mean reading the code line by line. […]
Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days? 58 points by tathagatadg 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments How has the curriculum changed? What are the professors telling their students to explain why the course they enrolled in deserves the rigorous study? Are the […]
Why Cloudflare rule order matters?
Before jumping into this article please take a look at the following Cloudflare ruleset and think for a while what is wrong with it? I set up above rules and thought they would work like the following: From the first glance it seems perfectly fine. Website administrator wants to challenge users opening the website to […]
Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
Introduction Back when flash storage was still very expensive, miniature hard drives offered a much better cost-per-gigabyte ratio. As IBM and later Hitachi produced the well-known 1-inch CompactFlash-form-factor microdrives, followed by Seagate, Western Digital, and GS Magicstor. From HotChips 13 “Microdrive: High Capacity Storage for the Handheld Revolution, Thomas Albrecht (IBM)” Link: Rather than competing […]
Starlink Mini as a Failover
I recently picked up a Starlink Mini to use as a backup connection for my home network. With the new £4.50 standby plan, it’s a great way to keep things online if my FTTP connection fails. My primary FTTP connection is generally excellent offering 5ms latency at best, having a backup; something that is reliant […]
How I write software with LLMs
I don’t care for the joy of programming Lately I’ve gotten heavily back into making stuff, and it’s mostly because of LLMs. I thought that I liked programming, but it turned out that what I like was making things, and programming was just one way to do that. Since LLMs have become good at programming, […]
What Is Agentic Engineering?
I use the term agentic engineering to describe the practice of developing software with the assistance of coding agents. What are coding agents? They’re agents that can both write and execute code. Popular examples include Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI. What’s an agent? Clearly defining that term is a challenge that has frustrated […]