Show HN: Hackerbrief – Top posts on Hacker News summarized daily
Bill C-22: A New Phase for Lawful Access Legislation Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, marks a new phase in the decades-long debate over government access to personal information, following the controversial Bill C-2. Last spring, Bill C-2 faced immediate backlash due to its ”unprecedented rules permitting widespread warrantless access to personal information,” which were […]
Even Faster Asin() Was Staring Right at Me
I don’t normally do follow-ups and never this quick. After posting that last article, it was fun to read the comments on Reddit and Hacker News as they rolled in. I even found other discussions. I couldn’t help wonder, ”Could I have made it even more performant?”. After heading home I decided to take another […]
Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance
When you write typed Python, you expect your type checker to follow the rules of the language. But how closely do today’s type checkers actually follow the Python typing specification? In this post, we look at what typing spec conformance means, how different type checkers compare, and what the conformance numbers don’t tell you. A […]
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elsewhere, across various distributions, had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year.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 […]