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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 4,916 posts.
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The Biology of a Large Language Model
We investigate the internal mechanisms used by Claude 3.5 Haiku — Anthropic's lightweight production model — in a variety of contexts, using our circuit tracing methodology.
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CO₂ and Other Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary driver of climate change. The world needs to decarbonize to reduce them.
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Atomic Commit in SQLite (2007)
An important feature of transactional databases like SQLite is "atomic commit". Atomic commit means that either all database changes within a single transaction occur or none of them occur. With atomic commit, it is as if many different writes to different sections of the database file occur instantaneously and…
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Introducing Babel
Babel is about letting many different languages work together. Programming languages live in code blocks inside natural language Org documents. A piece of data might pass from an Org table to a Python code block, then maybe move on to an R code block, and finally end up embedded as a value in the middle of a paragraph…
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If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
We could reduce the amount of land used for grazing and croplands used to grow animal feed.
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Russia's “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Russia's propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it does not commit to consistency.
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Introducing OpenAI
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive…
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Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking
Track Claude Code's daily performance on SWE-Bench-Pro as we collect an Opus 5.5/high baseline.
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Meet the People Taking over Hacker News
I did several different things while I was working on Hacker News, and these will now be taken over by different people. Kevin Hale (HN id kevin) will be in charge of design. I don’t think he plans to change much about the appearance of the site, but users will be happy to hear he has a plan to make it work better on…
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OpenAI LP
We’ve created OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company that allows us to rapidly increase our investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize our mission.
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How Figma's Multiplayer Technology Works
A peek into the homegrown solution we built as the first design tool with live collaborative editing.
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Way to store your dotfiles: A bare Git repository (2016)
It's time to find a better way to store your dotfiles. Learn why you should start using a bare Git repository instead.
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Clip: Connecting Text and Images
We’re introducing a neural network called CLIP which efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision. CLIP can be applied to any visual classification benchmark by simply providing the names of the visual categories to be recognized, similar to the “zero-shot” capabilities of GPT-2 and GPT-3.
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Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust (2020)
This post explains why Rust made sense for Discord to reimplement: how it was done, and the resulting performance improvements.
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Private by Design: How We Built Firefox Sync
Firefox Sync by default protects all your synced data so Mozilla can’t read it. We built Sync this way because we put user privacy first. How it works is...
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The Trouble with Tor
The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays where each relay only knows the next hop, not the ultimate destination.
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I, Pencil (1958)
Library of Economics and Liberty2016214 points162 commentscited by 28Society, Policy & Culture details
I am a lead pencil–the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write…. [From “I, Pencil”]
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No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
The risks and harms associated with drinking alcohol have been systematically evaluated over the years and are well documented. The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
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NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard
Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents
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E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
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Ruby website redesigned
A Programmer's Best Friend
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EFF: "Parallel construction" is really intelligence laundering
UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA's secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate...
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