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Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test
I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s new GPT-3 language model. When I got beta access, the first thing I wondered was, how human is GPT-3? How close is it ...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
152
Is TDD Dead? (2014)
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
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The TikTok War
How TikTok exposed Facebook’s blindspot, thanks to its Chinese roots, and why those Chinese roots make TikTok a genuine concern.
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A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a la...
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Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
The single best term I’ve learned this year. I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit. Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occur…
160
Ice Lake AVX-512 Downclocking
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
161
GPG and Me (2015)
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
162
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.
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I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
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So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)
166
Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
167
Programming with Categories
In this course we explain how category theory—a branch of mathematics known for its ability to organize the key abstractions that structure much of the mathematical universe—has become useful for writing elegant and maintainable code. In particular, we'll use examples from the Haskell programming language to motivate…
168
Creating a QR Code step by step
This JavaScript demo application visualizes in detailed steps, how a text string is encoded into a QR Code barcode symbol. The content of this page essentially explains and justifies how my QR Code generator library works internally.
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New in PHP 8
PHP 8.0 brings features like attributes, union types, and the JIT compiler. It has some important breaking changes, and improved performance.
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QBE vs. LLVM
Both QBE and LLVM are compiler backends using an SSA representation. This document will explain why LLVM does not make QBE a redundant project. Obviously, everything following is biased, because written by me.
171
Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
172
Log-log plot of new vs. total Covid-19 cases by country
Visualizing the exponential growth of COVID-19 across the world.
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The growth of command-line options, 1979-Present
My hobby : opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
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Banks, QE, and Money-Printing
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
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An Introduction to Lock-Free Programming (2012)
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
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What is Electricity? (1996)
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
177
Goodbye, Clean Code
Let clean code guide you. Then let it go.
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Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?
Investigation of the practice of port scanning site visitors for fingerprinting and tracking.
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Zero-day in Sign in with Apple
What if I say, your Email ID is all I need to takeover your account on your favorite website or an app. Sounds scary, right? This is what a…
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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
If you aren't familar, Hacktoberfest is an annual event that occurs every October. It is held by Digital Ocean and encourages developers to submit Pull…