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AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
Tonight, I took the time actually to read DeepMind’s AlphaCode paper, and to work through the example contest problems provided, and understand how I would’ve solved those problems, and how A…
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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California needs real math education, not gimmicks
A guest post by Armand Domalewski.
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Reddit's database has only two tables
Steve Huffman talks about Reddit’s approach to data storage in a High Scalability post from 2010. I was surprised to learn that they only have two tables in their database.
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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The Mathematical Hacker
The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as:
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Peter Naur's view of programming
To answer this question, let me take you a few years back, when I worked with a small high tech startup. We were working on a pretty complex augmented reality system spanning all layers from low-level computer vision components to cross-platform mobile and web apps. Especially for the lower-level components, a good…
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Architecture of the Playstation 2
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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1Password Leaks Your Data
Seriously.
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Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
We are now offering the complete Scorched Earth experience from a single downloadable zip file. The Totally Scorched zip file contains ready-to-run copies of every official version of Scorched Earth: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 (English and Spanish), 1.5 and a .MTN file builder. The zip file also contains instructions and an HTML…
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Python is Actually Portable
Gautham's Blog
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SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
My personal website and blog
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How I wrote Game Programming Patterns
Update 2014/04/28: In case you missed the link, the web site for my book is gameprogrammingpatterns.com .
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Adventures in Netflix
I’ve been watching a buttload of 40s movies over the past few months, and I was thinking about watching something really modern next. And then it occurred to me: How about if I watch all R…
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My Tungsten Cube (2019)
A few months ago I bought a featureless cube of tungsten. It’s 1.5 inches across and cost $130, but I argue it was one of the best purchases I’ve made recently.
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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …
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Eight Years at Roblox
I joined Roblox at the end of 2012 as a rendering engineer; I had just spent more than a year working on various titles from FIFA franchise after years of console game development and was becoming a bit tired of the “big game development”. My work on FIFA was as a contractor and I got an offer for a full-time…
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ORM is an anti-pattern
ORM looks great early in a project but breaks down as complexity grows, forcing you to learn SQL anyway. Relations aren't objects. Either use NoSQL for object-like data or write a model layer with real SQL. ORM's abstraction is leaky, its efficiency poor, and the alternatives are better.
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Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
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The EC2 firewall is broken
As most standards-aware network administrators know, blocking ICMP is evil. Sure, there are certain ICMP packets which should be blocked; but to quote RFC 2979 :
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Fast 2D Rendering on GPU
Previously on my quest for fast rendering of 2D vector graphics on GPU, I have posted a piet-gpu update and a deeper exploration into a sort-middle architecture. These intermediate results showed promise, but fell short of my vision for truly high performance 2D GPU rendering.
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LLM Powered Autonomous Agents
Building agents with LLM (large language model) as its core controller is a cool concept. Several proof-of-concepts demos, such as AutoGPT, GPT-Engineer and BabyAGI, serve as inspiring examples. The potentiality of LLM extends beyond generating well-written copies, stories, essays and programs; it can be framed as a…
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How RocksDB Works
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.