The Front Page

1h, 34p, 1 comments

Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)

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7h, 193p, 7 comments

I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

“50 Hours to Draw Some Lines” is Doug MacDowell’s personal project documenting his experiment in hand‑drawing data visualizations using traditional drafting tools—rulers, T‑squares, pens, and a lettering kit—rather than software. Over 50 hours he creates a statistically accurate line graph of a coffee‑maker computer, describes the step‑by‑step workflow (grid layout, plotting points with a circle stencil, inking, erasing, adding titles and annotations), and lists classic reference books by Tufte, Du Bois, and Brinton. The piece argues that manual rendering offers an artistic, mindful counterpoint to digital tools, while also providing a detailed tutorial and a curated list of essential materials.

2h, 13p, 2 comments

Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation

The study by Francesco Dente , Dario Satriani and Paolo Papotti shows that large language model agents experience constraint decay, with performance dropping roughly 30 points in assertion pass rates and often falling toward zero as structural requirements become stricter, especially in convention‑heavy frameworks like FastAPI and Django versus minimal ones such as Flask, and identifies data‑layer defects—including incorrect query composition and ORM runtime violations—as the leading root causes.

14h, 323p, 14 comments

Wake up! 16b

At the Outline Demoparty in May 2026, the 16-byte x86 assembly program 'wake up! 16b' stunned the demoscene by generating a Sierpinski fractal and synchronized sound from minimal code. By leveraging BIOS video memory at 0xb800 and outputting to the PC speaker via port 61h, it creates diagonal pillars of characters on screen and a gritty square wave audio derived from XOR-based cellular automata. The program's elegance lies in its use of additive prefix sums and modulo arithmetic, revealing deep mathematical relations—such as binomial sequences and rule 60 automata—in just 16 bytes, as detailed by developer HellMood. Real hardware tests confirmed its environment-sensitive output , embracing hardware quirks like shadowed BIOS code for unique audiovisual effects that differ across systems.

11h, 86p, 11 comments

The C64 Dead Test Font

The C64 “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge (Rev. 718220) runs in Ultimax mode, embedding its own 58‑character font in ROM at $EAD8 to bypass the computer’s built‑in ROMs and display a distinctive boxy typeface inspired by the MICR E‑13B set, complete with an Easter‑egg “transit” symbol at screen code $0x21 that nods to bank‑routing delimiters; the font implements uppercase letters, digits, a few punctuation marks and border glyphs, and the author has released compatible Dead Test font ROMs for the C64, VIC‑20 and PET systems for general use.

5h, 18p, 5 comments

Show HN: Git-based front-end interface for Hugo

Hugo-Flow is a Git-based front-end interface for static Hugo websites, enabling direct commits to repositories via GitHub API. It features dynamic configuration for selecting repositories and paths, dual editor modes (WYSIWYG and raw markdown), and image uploads converted to base64. Local development requires setting up environment variables (`NEXTAUTH_URL`, `GITHUB_ID/SECRET`) and running `npm install`/`npm run dev`. Production deployment options include Node.js (`npm run build`/`npm start`) or Docker/Caddy with GitHub OAuth app updates, environment variable configurations (`NEXTAUTH_SECRET`, production secrets), and Caddy reverse proxy setup. Documentation highlights setup steps, security settings, and deployment workflows for both dev and production environments.

15h, 94p, 15 comments

My I3-Emacs Integration

The author patched i3 to forward key events to Emacs when the focused window’s class matches a passthrough binding, adding a `passthrough` field to the `Binding` struct, extending the config parser to recognize a `--passthrough` flag, and implementing Emacs Lisp functions for window‑movement and terminal launching, which together provide seamless, low‑latency integration of Emacs with the i3 tiling window manager.

1d, 202p, 1 comments

Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

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4h, 5p, 4 comments

What it takes to transpose a matrix

The article by Andrei Gudkov demonstrates how to optimize matrix transpose for x86_64 CPUs, starting from a naive implementation that takes 3.90 cycles per element and progressively improving through techniques like reversing access order, block decomposition, software prefetching, and SIMD vectorization. The Vec256Buf algorithm, which uses 64x64 cache-aligned...