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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. 428 posts.
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Will scaling work?
Data bottlenecks, generalization benchmarks, primate evolution, intelligence as compression, world modelers, and other considerations
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John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
ps aux | more
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Evading JavaScript anti-debugging techniques
Debuggers serve as invaluable tools that empower developers to halt code execution and thoroughly analyze its behavior at any given moment. By utilizing debuggers, developers can efficiently identify and resolve issues within their code, making it an indispensable part of their toolkit.
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The Unix process API is unreliable and unsafe (2021)
It is difficult to write software which reliably and safely manages processes on Unix; this is because of flaws in the API. I know of no Unix system which has solved these problems, but in this article I'll be specifically talking about the Linux process API.
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When did SVB insiders begin to realize they were in trouble?
When did Silicon Valley Bank insiders begin to realize they were potentially in trouble?
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PgBouncer is useful, important, and fraught with peril
Updated 2024-09-17 to reflect updated PgBouncer support for protocol-level prepared statements 🐘 To start, I want to say that I’m appreciative that PgBouncer exists and the work its open source maintainers put into it. I also love working with PostgreSQL, and I’m thankful for the incredible amount of work and…
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Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
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Wii Architecture – A Practical Analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
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Lisping at JPL Revisited
It has been over 20 years since I wrote " Lisping at JPL ", half memoir and half geeky screed (and all of it half-baked) about how an obscur...
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ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
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Many options for running Mistral models in your terminal using LLM
Mistral AI is the most exciting AI research lab at the moment. They’ve now released two extremely powerful smaller Large Language Models under an Apache 2 license, and have a …
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Bare-Metal Kubernetes, Part I: Talos on Hetzner
I’ve been running a Kubernetes cluster on a mix of virtual and bare metal machines with Hetzner for about a year now, and while the setup has served me well, being a very exploratory exercise at the time it wasn’t very well documented.
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Showering at the South Pole
Potable water, and not much of it.
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AI and Trust
I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who…
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Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
If you skim this blog entry too quickly or just read the title, you might think I am someone who does not like F#. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the last several months, I have become a big F# fan. It has become my preferred language for personal projects.
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GPT-4 gets a B on my quantum computing final exam
Update (April 14): On the suggestion of my TA Justin Yirka, I gave GPT-4 problem 2 from the final exam, along with its own answers and my and Justin’s grading comments, and asked it whether i…
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Devirtualizing nike.com's bot protection
In this blog post, we'll examine the virtualization obfuscation used by Nike
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Learn Wayland by writing a GUI from scratch
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Wayland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland…
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Overhead of Returning Optional Values in Java and Rust (2021)
Some programming languages like Java or Scala offer more than one way to express a concept of “lack of value”. Traditionally, a special null value is used to...
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Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
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Chinchilla’s death
“With more careful calculations, one can win; with less, one cannot” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War .
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Experts fear crooks are cracking keys stolen in LastPass breach
In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech…
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Working for a Dating Website (2015)
Over this past weekend, I came across a Wired called "Write the Perfect Email to Anyone with this Creepy Site" on using machine learning and natural language processing to analyze a person's social media profiles and offer tips on how to communicate with them effectively. Most people immediately thought about sales…