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Three Observations
Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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What to Know Before Debating Type Systems (2008)
I was asked by someone to put this old piece of writing of mine somewhere more permanent, so here it is. A few comments off the top: This isn’t new. I wrote it years ago. Yes, I’m a b…
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Introduction to Clifford Algebra (2006)
Clifford algebra gives a unified view of many things that otherwise would need to be understood separately.
3245
Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent
Preface: I don’t use iCloud. I don’t use an Apple ID. I don’t use the Mac App Store. I don’t store photos in the macOS “Photos” application, even locally. I…
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The Zizians and the rationalist death cult
What is the deal with Rationalism and cults?
3247
Emergent Features in 6.7B+ Param Transformers
When I attended NAACL, I wanted to do a little test. I had two pitches for my LLM.int8() paper. One pitch is about how I use advanced quantization methods to achieve no performance degradation transformer inference at scale that makes large models more accessible. The other pitch talks about emergent outliers in…
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Reasons Not to Use Google (2015)
Google is forcing its bullshit generator, Gemini, on many users of Gmail without asking them, and not even offering the users a way to deactivate it.
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Stop Writing Dead Programs
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
3252
English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
3253
Chinese Mobile UI Trends
A summary of common idioms and visual language found in Chinese smartphone apps.
3254
How to Drop Out (2004)
People who work get bored when they don't work. People who don't work never get bored.
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Removing garbage collection from the Rust language (2013)
I've been floating ways to simplify the memory management story in Rust around the core team lately. Memory management is a contentious topic, since we've worked hard to get to the current state of things, and with the push toward stability lately, there is a (quite reasonable!) resistance to any changes at this…
3257
YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
This article contains a list of the top 50 YC software startups (sourced from the October 2019 YC Top Companies page). It also contains aggregated statistics for valuations and back-end programming languages used. Values in this article are sourced, but I cannot guarantee their accuracy. Find me on Twitter…
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The Art of Unix Programming
My fourth book.
3259
Separate Your Billing from Entitlements
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…
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ASCII and Unicode quotation marks
Do not use the ASCII character 0x60 (grave accent) as a left quotation mark together with 0x27 (apostrophe), because it will look silly with modern correct fonts.
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Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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The Principles of Versioning in Go
This blog post is about how we added package versioning to Go, in the form of Go modules, and the reasons we made the choices we did. It is adapted and updated from a talk I gave at GopherCon Singapore in 2018 .
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It’s time to stop using SMS for security
By now most infosec professionals are aware of various ways SMS text messaging can be hijacked. For example so-called “SIM Swap” attacks…
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Broken by design: systemd
Recently the topic of systemd has come up quite a bit in various communities in which I'm involved, including the musl IRC channel and on the Busybox mailing list .
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A skeptical response to Musk's hyperloop
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish…
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Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter (2018)
TL;DR: A digital typewriter based on a Raspberry Pi and an E-Ink screen. The code/build instructions are available on GitHub .
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Using MySQL as a NoSQL - A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server
UPDATE: Oracle officially released memcached daemon plugin that talks with InnoDB. I'm glad to see that NoSQL+MySQL has become an official ...