Technology Commentary

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Considering how the user benefits when a mature project goes fully open-source—even one with the baggage of something like Gumroad.

: Linux types mobilize website to help people avoid creating more e-waste

Execute sandboxed Lua code on the BEAM VM using Luerl

I’ve been using AI coding assistants like Claude Code for a while now, and I’m here to say (with all due respect to people who have…

Simplest overview of HTTP Authentication

Why do we retrospect on our incidents? Why spend the time doing those write-ups and holding review meetings? We don’t do this work as some sort of intellectual exercise for amusement. Rather,…

An exploration of the Winner’s Curse, how it causes us to overestimate model performance, and what to do about it.

Stop reinventing the wheel. The web was doing just fine before your bloated frameworks crawled out of the sewer.

Don’t you love it when the title track is the first one on the album? I had to single out this adjustable keyboard called the Protractor, because look at it! The whole thing moves, you know. …

Which works until it doesn't

If you’ve only been around for the Internet age, you may not realize that Hackaday is the successor of electronics magazines. In their heyday, magazines like Popular Electronics, Radio Electr…

Vintage hi-fi gear has a look and feel all its own. [ThunderOwl] happened to be playing in this space, turning a heavily-modified Technics stereo stack into an awesome neo-retro PC case. Meet the &…

Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with thos…

A bicycle is perhaps one of the most repairable pieces of equipment one can own — no matter what’s wrong with it, and wherever you are on the planet, you’ll be able to find somebo…

There was a time when each and every printer and typesetter had its own quirky language. If you had a wordprocessor from a particular company, it worked with the printers from that company, and tha…

How MapQuest, a company innovative enough to kill road atlases in one fell swoop, was turned into an also-ran by a bad merger affected by an even worse one.

The year 2025 is the time for a site redesign. So, I’m thinking about what matters and what might be meaningless.

A few months ago, Casey Newton of Platformer ran a piece called "The phony comforts of AI skepticism," framing those who would criticize generative AI as "having fun," damning them as "hyper-fixated on the things [AI] can't do." I am not going to focus too hard on this blog, in

Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better Offline? I have

Tremuloides is a data store that stores a tree structure in a backing database.

If you're gonna spew code, spew it into this set of controls

A free service streams old radio programs from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Honestly, it's wonderful.

Smart CIOs should consider how they need to redefine their infrastructure for the third era of networking.

Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered…