4621
Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"
Link to: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
4622
Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go
L19 = 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935
4623
AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything.
4624
Probabilistic Data Structures For Web Analytics And Data Mining
Statistical analysis and mining of huge multi-terabyte data sets is a common task nowadays, especially in the areas like web analytics and Internet advertising. Analysis of such large data sets oft…
4625
How I made the print and eBook versions of my web book
It’s a funny feeling to spend nearly six years making something and then finally hold it in your hand. It’s simultaneously, “This is it! ” and “Is this it?” How can it be so small when it feels like such a big piece of my life?
4626
The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
4627
Probabilistic Filters By Example
Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…
4628
JavaScript Needs Blocks
While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby's blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript's "first class functions". Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both…
4629
The Dangers of Low Head Dams (2019)
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
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4631
How generics were added to .NET
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s start with a quick history lesson, courtesy of Don Syme who worked on adding generics to .NET and then went on to design and implement F#, which is a pretty impressive set of achievements!!
4632
Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
A little post on why publishing statistics are so confusing
4633
Who smeared Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman's FBI file contains one very pointed, personal, anonymous attack. But can we figure out who wrote it from the context?
4634
Ghost in the ethernet optic
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
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Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
A while ago, I bought the book “ The Go Programming Language ” written by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan. I have always been a fan of Brian Kernighan’s writings. I should admit that I bought the book mainly for his great examples and writings than for the Go language itself, but since then have got interested in the…
4637
WasmBoxC: Simple, Fast, and VM-Less Sandboxing
The software ecosystem has a lot of useful but unsafe code, and the easier it is to sandbox that code, the moreoften that’ll happen. If it were as simple as ...
4638
Investor Herd Dynamics
August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly…
4639
Burn Baby Burn
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
4640
SimCity: Will Wright's City in a Box
In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he…
4641
Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)
I’ve seen people be genuinely puzzled about why functional programming is not more popular. For example I’m currently reading “Out of the Tar Pit” where after arguing for fu…
4642
Startup Ideas
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
4643
A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
4644
Switching from Gmail to FastMail
I switched from Gmail to FastMail a few months ago (in early 2013) and I’ve been meaning to write a post about how I did it.
4645
SIMD-friendly algorithms for substring searching (2016)
Popular programming languages provide methods or functions which locate a substring in a given string. In C it is the function strstr , the C++ class std::string has the method find , Python's string has methods pos and index , and so on, so forth. All these APIs were designed for one-shot searches . During past…
4646
Is the reversal curse in LLMs real?
A recent paper The Reversal Curse points out an apparent failure in large large language models like GPT-4. From the abstract: We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is
4647
Stanford Alpaca, and the acceleration of on-device LLM development
On Saturday 11th March I wrote about how Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment. Today is Monday. Let’s look at what’s happened in the past three days. …
4648
Overview of Rust error handling libraries
Rust's error handling is a pleasure to use thanks to the Result type . It ensures Rust's error handling is always correct , visible , and performant . And with the addition of the ? operator in Rust 1.13 , and the addition of return types from main in Rust 1.26 Rust's error handling has only kept improving.
4649
YAML: The Norway Problem (2022)
Earlier this week, Haroen Viaene posted this tweet about YAML: worst part of yaml: https://yaml.org/type/bool.html — Haroen Viaene (@haroenv) January 10, 2022 The linked-to page contains the documentation on what defines a boolean in YAML, and details that it can be parsed using this regex…
4650
Understanding the math behind 0x5f3759df and the fast inverse square root (2012)
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.