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Signs that you are a bad programmer
Reasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path (“running the program in your head”) while knowing what the goal of the code is.
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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Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
“These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.”
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Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
4324
GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst
GitHub Actions has a package manager that ignores decades of supply chain security best practices: no lockfile, no integrity verification, no transitive pinning
4325
Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.
4326
PyTorch Internals: Ezyang's Blog
This post is a long form essay version of a talk about PyTorch internals, that I gave at the PyTorch NYC meetup on May 14, 2019.
4327
Rust for Python Programmers
Are you a Python programmer and interested in Rust? This article goes over the basics of making the jump.
4328
O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul
Several years ago I was courted by O’Reilly Media. After the success of my first book, Show Me the Numbers , the folks at O’Reilly were interested in publishing my second. I responded cautiously at first, because my prior self-publishing experience was extremely positive. Analytics Press, the publisher of Show Me the…
4329
Let's code a TCP/IP stack (2016)
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
4330
HTML Web Components
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to…
4331
The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…
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Game Engine Black Books Update
I have kept myself busy with the Game Engine Black Books and I have plenty of news. Most importantly, they have been revised. The DOOM book is now in version 1.1 while the WOLF3D book is entering v2.1. And there is more.
4334
I was seven words away from being spear-phished
Three weeks ago I received a very flattering email from the University of Cambridge, asking me to judge the Adam Smith Prize for Economics:
4335
Late Bronze Age Collapse
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026432 points316 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system …
4336
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
4337
How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
A startup called Taalas , recently released an ASIC chip running Llama 3.1 8B (3/6 bit quant) at an inference rate of 17,000 tokens per seconds. That's like writing around 30 A4 sized pages in one second. They claim it's 10x cheaper in ownership cost than GPU based inference systems and is 10x less electricity hog…
4338
Excel Never Dies
The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies
4339
Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls
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Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
4342
Hacking Google Bard – From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration
Recently Google Bard got some powerful updates, including Extensions. Extensions allow Bard to access YouTube, search for flights and hotels, and also to access …
4343
JavaScript Bloat in 2024
What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website? Fuck around and find out!
4344
Making a Game in Rust
Last week, I released A Snake’s Tale on iOS , Android , Windows, Mac, and Linux .
4345
What I Hate About Git
Git is the source code version control system that is rapidly becoming the standard for open source projects. It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things wit…
4346
Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK)…
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An opinionated approach to GNU Make
Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.
4349
How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career
If it hurts to type you’ll have a much harder time working as a programmer. Yes, there’s voice recognition, but it’s just not the same. So when my wrist and arm pain returned soon after starting a new job I was starting to get a little scared. The last two times this happened I’d had to take months and then years off…
4350
DOGE as a National Cyberattack
In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national…