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A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning (2015)
What is machine learning? See how it works with our animated data visualization.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
632
Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either…
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Tough times on the road to Starcraft
The road to StarCraft was a brutal sequence of bad breaks, hard pivots, and near-disasters. This is the part most people never heard.
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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
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How Many Computers Are in Your Computer?
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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Hard disk hacking
Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. The video of that talk (minus the first few minutes) is now online .
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A look at search engines with their own indexes (2021)
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
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D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
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Spaced Repetition
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
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Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
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Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
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Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)
A matrix for rating programmers on computer science, software engineering, programming, security, infrastructure, data, AI-assisted development, experience and knowledge, from 2ⁿ to log(n).
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In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
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Ssss: Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (2006)
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
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The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
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Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
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Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)
Bill Buxton Microsoft Research Original: Jan. 12, 2007 Version: December 10th, 2025
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Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…
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Semantic Compression
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
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Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups
660
Founders at work: Interview with Steve Wozniak
Interview: Steve Wozniak , Co-Founder, Apple Computer If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that...