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How to be a -10x Engineer
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 428 posts.
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Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment
The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the …
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Push ifs up and fors down
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
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My startup banking story
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
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Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)
Challenging projects every programmer should try
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My personal C coding style as of late 2023
This has been a ground-breaking year for my C skills, and paradigm shifts in my technique has provoked me to reconsider my habits and coding style. It’s been my largest personal style change in years, so I’ve decided to take a snapshot of its current state and my reasoning. These changes have produced significant…
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Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model
I found some details about Apple’s new predictive text model, coming soon in iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma.
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Cops still take more stuff from people than burglars do (2021)
Let’s get one thing out of the way: it’s not normal to stuff $100,000 in cash into a suitcase and then check said suitcase on to a domestic flight.
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The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
This is not just “Kids these days”
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Prompt injection: what’s the worst that can happen?
Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now. Many of these applications are potentially vulnerable to prompt …
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The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
The UK discarded 6% of its windpower last year, at a cost of almost £1bn. What’s going on, and how can we fix it?
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Nakatomi Space
[Image: From Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe].While watching Die Hard the other night—easily one of the best architectural films of …
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Regex engine internals as a library
Over the last several years, I’ve rewritten Rust’s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata , which exposes much of the regex crate internals as their own APIs for…
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Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
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Meta in Myanmar
I’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed.
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Gaussian splatting is pretty cool
SIGGRAPH 2023 just had a paper “ 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering ” by Kerbl, Kopanas, Leimkühler, Drettakis, and it looks pretty cool! Check out their website, source code repository, data sets and so on (I should note that it is really, really good to see full source and full data sets…
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Arena allocator tips and tricks
Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation . With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime . With the core details of my own…
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SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new
SQL:2023 has been wrapped. The final text has been submitted by the working group to ISO Central Secretariat, and it’s now up to the ISO gods when it will be published. Based on past experience, it could be between a few weeks and a few months.
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Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
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The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise
Around the end of high school, I started to get really into photography. My friend (let’s call him T) was also into it, which should have been great fun. But it wasn’t. Going shooting with him was never great, for a reason I didn’t figure out till much later. I wanted to take photos. T mostly enjoyed tinkering with…
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Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym
Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests…
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Modern C for C++ peeps (2019)
(update 26-Aug-2020: the MSVC team has recently added C11language support to their roadmap, hooray!)
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The Market for Lemons
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
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Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V
GPT4-V is the new mode of GPT-4 that allows you to upload images as part of your conversations. It’s absolutely brilliant. It also provides a whole new set of vectors …
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Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
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The anatomy of a Godot API call
UPDATE: This article has started an ongoing conversation with the Godot devs. They care about the issues raised, and would like to improve things. Significant improvements will almost certainly be made, although it’s still early days and it’s unclear what will change and by how much. I am encouraged by the response. I…