241
Streaming HTML out of order without JavaScript
Chris Haynes - web developer consultant
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 290 posts.
242
So you want to build a browser engine
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
243
The Later Years of Douglas Adams
If God exists, he must have a sense of humor, for why else would he have strewn so many practical jokes around his creation? Among them is the uncanny phenomenon of the talented writer who absolutely hates to write.
244
Diffusion Is Spectral Autoregression
A deep dive into spectral analysis of diffusion models of images, revealing how they implicitly perform a form of autoregression in the frequency domain.
245
New 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the…
246
Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023
2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most interesting development in the academic field of …
247
"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso's personal website.
248
Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
249
The borrow checker within
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
250
Traceroute Isn't Real
Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool
251
Qlock – A JavaScript Quine Clock
Displays the current time in a seven-segment style, embedded within its own JavaScript source code. (321 bytes)
252
The Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight (2023)
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
253
100% User-Supported
If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...
254
Are We Watching the Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
255
ESP32-S3 has a few SIMD instructions
Intro Espressif Systems released their ESP32-S3 SoC a few years ago, but only recently have they released more documentation and support of ...
256
Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead (2017)
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
257
Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
258
Python datetime pitfalls, and what libraries are (not) doing about it
It’s no secret that the Python datetime library has its quirks. Not only are there probably more than you think; third-party libraries don’t address most of them! I created a new library to explore what a better datetime library could look like.
259
Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
260
Data Science at the Command Line, 2nd Edition (2021)
This thoroughly revised guide demonstrates how the flexibility of the command line can help you become a more efficient and productive data scientist. You’ll learn how to combine small yet powerful command-line tools to quickly obtain, scrub, explore, and model your data. To get you started, author Jeroen Janssens…
261
Double encryption: Analyzing the NSA/GCHQ arguments against hybrids
In 2019, Google and Cloudflare ran an experiment where they upgraded HTTPS for many "real users’ connections" to use post-quantum encryption. They then reported statistics on how affordable this was. Google had also run a similar experiment in 2016: "While it's still very early days for quantum computers, we're…
262
Every webpage deserves to be a place
Posted on Thursday 5 Sep 2024. 1,133 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.
263
What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
264
PostgreSQL High Availability Solutions – Part 1: Jepsen Test and Patroni
Note: code used in this article can be found on the Github repo jepsen-postgres-ha .
265
Extending Rust's Effect System
This is the transcript of my RustConf 2023 talk: "Extending Rust's Effect System", presented on September 13th 2023 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and streamed online.
266
Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
267
LLMs don't do formal reasoning
Important new study from Apple
268
Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs Is a Bad Idea
I think turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea. However, recent news coverage has been framing the weaponization of pagers and radios in the Middle East as something we do not need to concern ourselves with because “we” are safe.
269
The evolution of a Scheme programmer (2020)
For a real-life implementation, see how Racket's math/number-theory does it here .
270
SIMD < SIMT < SMT: Parallelism in Nvidia GPUs (2011)
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.