Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. The trends we've been seeing are…
(Big issue 7-9-2019)
The previous post described [motherboards and the memory map] memory-map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair - fun st
This article is available as Korean- (thanks to longfin ) and Chineese- (thanks to webup ) translation.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Caveat: This post is meant address people who are completely new to deep learning and are planning an entry into this field. The intention is to help them think critically about the complexity of the field, and to help them tell apart things that are trivial from things that are...
The Traditional City simply refers to the pattern of development that human civilization has built in for millenia.
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
This is a hack for the popular game, Flappy Bird. Although the game is no longer available on Google Play or the App Store, it did not stop folks from creating very good replicas for the web. People have also created some interesting variants of the game - Flappy Bird Typing Tutor and Flappy Math Saga.
Data bottlenecks, generalization benchmarks, primate evolution, intelligence as compression, world modelers, and other considerations
Over on GitHub, David Yu has an interesting performance benchmark for function calls of various Foreign Function Interfaces ( FFI ):
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.
In 2005 and 2006, a series of significant results were published against SHA-1 [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]. These repeated break-throughs caused something of a crisis of faith as cryptographers questioned whether we knew how to build hash functions at all. After all, many hash functions from the 1990's had not aged well [ 1 ][ 2…
There has been much discussion of using the Rust language in the Linux kernel (for example, here , here , and here ), at the Kangrejos Rust for Linux Workshop ( here , here , and here ) and 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference had a number of sessions on this topic, as did Maintainers Summit . At least…
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Correctness in the face of cancellations: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2025.
On August 31, 2015, I started a Ph.D. in cryptography at TU Eindhoven, working with Tanja Lange and Dan Bernstein. On December 2, 2016, I…
