buttondown.com on Hacker News

What TLA+ can and can't check(buttondown.com)

223 points by b-man 26 days ago | 47 comments

Hillel Wayne's Computer Things newsletter post on the limits of what TLA+ can verify, pushing back on claims that TLA+ with AI models will make AI-written code reliable.

The LLMs Yearn for the Spines(buttondown.com)

11 points by zdw 1 month ago | 1 comments

Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch(buttondown.com)

145 points by maguay 1 month ago | 110 comments

A bizarre Commodore 64 peripheral, a mime, and some pretty bad ads(buttondown.com)

86 points by rfarley04 1 month ago | 12 comments

Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)(buttondown.com)

109 points by rfarley04 2 months ago | 92 comments

What I love about Django(buttondown.com)

105 points by j4mie 2 months ago | 86 comments

The American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay (2024)(buttondown.com)

47 points by NaOH 3 months ago | 37 comments

Stroustrup's Rule (2024)(buttondown.com)

102 points by bmacho 4 months ago | 28 comments

The physicists who convinced Fermilab to send Brazil's emails(buttondown.com)

47 points by maguay 5 months ago | 17 comments

Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure(buttondown.com)

71 points by danborn26 5 months ago | 70 comments

Refuse to let your doctor record you(buttondown.com)

118 points by speckx 6 months ago | 125 comments

Email could have been X.400 times better(buttondown.com)

214 points by maguay 6 months ago | 175 comments

Columnar Storage Is Normalization(buttondown.com)

99 points by ibobev 6 months ago | 36 comments

Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict(buttondown.com)

114 points by rfarley04 6 months ago | 68 comments

Floyd's Sampling Algorithm(buttondown.com)

33 points by ibobev 6 months ago | 2 comments

AI and the Illegal War(buttondown.com)

40 points by interpol_p 7 months ago | 8 comments

In 1985 Maxell built a bunch of life-size robots for its bad floppy ad(buttondown.com)

131 points by rfarley04 7 months ago | 19 comments

Refinement Without Specification(buttondown.com)

25 points by BerislavLopac 9 months ago | 1 comments

My Gripes with Prolog(buttondown.com)

132 points by azhenley 9 months ago | 76 comments

When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023)(buttondown.com)

94 points by atan2 10 months ago | 70 comments

I ****Ing Hate Science (2021)(buttondown.com)

31 points by todsacerdoti 11 months ago | 27 comments

Protein Is a Trap and I Have Fallen into It, or Second Breakfast #19(buttondown.com)

4 points by KittenInABox 1 year ago | 0 comments

The death of thread per core(buttondown.com)

134 points by ibobev 1 year ago | 55 comments

Why did containers happen?(buttondown.com)

175 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 216 comments

Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)(buttondown.com)

306 points by swyx 1 year ago | 136 comments

Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice(buttondown.com)

158 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 99 comments

Email was the user interface for the first AI recommendation engines(buttondown.com)

65 points by coloneltcb 1 year ago | 21 comments

Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate(buttondown.com)

131 points by PaulHoule 1 year ago | 96 comments

Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems(buttondown.com)

632 points by mpweiher 1 year ago | 499 comments

Hillel Wayne's Computer Things newsletter post arguing that many hard LeetCode interview problems are easily solved with constraint solvers.

How RSS beat Microsoft(buttondown.com)

282 points by vidyesh 1 year ago | 157 comments

I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024)(buttondown.com)

92 points by shlomo_z 1 year ago | 83 comments

How to Not Build the Torment Nexus(buttondown.com)

14 points by p3_1080 1 year ago | 0 comments

Words about Arrays and Tables(buttondown.com)

52 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 21 comments

How email tracking works behind the scenes(buttondown.com)

5 points by vidyesh 1 year ago | 0 comments

The many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade(buttondown.com)

221 points by LinguaBrowse 1 year ago | 79 comments

Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization(buttondown.com)

121 points by samuel246 1 year ago | 104 comments

How to Leave the House(buttondown.com)

43 points by zdw 1 year ago | 39 comments

Solving LinkedIn Queens with SMT(buttondown.com)

123 points by azhenley 1 year ago | 36 comments

What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway(buttondown.com)

127 points by BerislavLopac 1 year ago | 126 comments

Why Property Testing Finds Bugs Unit Testing Does Not (2021)(buttondown.com)

43 points by Tomte 1 year ago | 41 comments

E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper(buttondown.com)

97 points by rfarley04 1 year ago | 86 comments

How to Not Get Poisoned in America(buttondown.com)

13 points by giraffe_lady 1 year ago | 1 comments

Requirements change until they don't(buttondown.com)

4 points by azhenley 1 year ago | 0 comments

Propositional Parlor Puzzle(buttondown.com)

20 points by foldU 1 year ago | 1 comments

AMP and why emails are not (and should never be) interactive(buttondown.com)

207 points by maguay 1 year ago | 142 comments

The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder(buttondown.com)

87 points by BerislavLopac 1 year ago | 92 comments

Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog(buttondown.com)

99 points by Tomte 1 year ago | 24 comments

It's Time to Stop Building KV Databases(buttondown.com)

51 points by foldU 1 year ago | 37 comments

Verification-First Development(buttondown.com)

46 points by vinipolicena 1 year ago | 21 comments

Five Kinds of Nondeterminism(buttondown.com)

107 points by BerislavLopac 1 year ago | 28 comments

Are efficiency and horizontal scalability at odds?(buttondown.com)

36 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 30 comments

Why do regexes use `$` and `^` as line anchors? (2024)(buttondown.com)

58 points by srijan4 1 year ago | 24 comments

Formally Modeling Dreidel, the Sequel(buttondown.com)

92 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 24 comments

Thoughts on DuckDB's Crazy Grammar Thing(buttondown.com)

8 points by foldU 1 year ago | 0 comments

Fine, I'll Play With Skiplists(buttondown.com)

104 points by foldU 1 year ago | 12 comments

The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition (2020)(buttondown.com)

145 points by BerislavLopac 1 year ago | 75 comments

Unusual Raku Features(buttondown.com)

246 points by leontrolski 1 year ago | 136 comments

Turing kicked us out of Heaven (2023)(buttondown.com)

30 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 25 comments

Ternary Operators(buttondown.com)

45 points by azhenley 1 year ago | 48 comments

Adventures in Probability(buttondown.com)

140 points by kiyanwang 2 years ago | 34 comments

Decoupling design from engineering(buttondown.com)

58 points by jwworth 2 years ago | 25 comments

TLA from First Principles(buttondown.com)

78 points by ingve 2 years ago | 17 comments

It's not enough for a program to work – it has to work for the right reasons(buttondown.com)

105 points by BerislavLopac 2 years ago | 54 comments

Why Not Comments(buttondown.com)

235 points by ghewgill 2 years ago | 237 comments

State and time are the same thing(buttondown.com)

35 points by BerislavLopac 2 years ago | 20 comments

Pie doesn't need to be original unless you claim it so(buttondown.com)

128 points by brianyu8 2 years ago | 97 comments