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Does Georgism work? Five years later
A guest post by Lars Doucet
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.
7202
Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
The company, which ranks among the top corporate philanthropists in the U.S., will continue to pursue and invest in other areas where it can make meaningful change—from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities.
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I’m Not a Robot
Prove your humanity once and for all
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Sorting Two Tons of Lego, the Software Side
All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called…
7206
Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.
7207
Curl is C
For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →
7208
Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code
From media reports and individual findings that various people have presented to us, it seems that the new social media platform owned by the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, so-called Truth Social, is using Mastodon’s source code with various visual adjustments. The platform has not formally…
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New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
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Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
7213
Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript
I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher …
7214
U.S. house prices are rising exponentially faster than income
Across the U.S., home prices have outpaced income. Our data reveals how the American dream of homeownership is becoming a nightmare.
7215
6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available
Update: March 11, 2026 If you use Certbot, see Six-Day and IP Address Certificates Available in Certbot for details on requesting these certificates. Short-lived and IP address certificates are now generally available from Let’s Encrypt. These certificates are valid for 160 hours, just over six days. In order to get a…
7216
GNU Recutils
Fred and George, Turtles in love There are hundreds of cool command line tools that have been made over the years built on the unix philosophy. Plain text is powerful, ubiquitous, and human-centric. It was also the only option for computing for quite a while. It’s no surprise that some of the most sophisticated tools…
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Writing Safe Shell Scripts (2019)
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7218
Why Arabic is Terrific
I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute…
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My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown
How My Mindfulness Practice Lead Me To Meltdown
7221
Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exploits
Intel Newsroom delivers the latest news, announcements, and updates. Stay informed on Intel innovations.
7222
Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
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Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled
It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexam…
7224
The media's lab leak fiasco
A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes
7225
From deep to long learning?
For the last two years , a line of work in our lab has been to increase sequence length. We thought longer sequences would enable a new era of machine learning foundation models: they could learn from longer contexts, multiple media sources, complex demonstrations, and more. All data ready and waiting to be learned…
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} // good to go
Okay, let's see what we've got. Two sets of annotated training materials. Six books. Over four dozen online videos. Some 80 articles, inter...
7227
The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
Why did mental health fall off a cliff at the same time and in the same way in the USA, The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? Part 1 of 3.
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Achieving 11M IOPS and 66 GB/S IO on a Single ThreadRipper Workstation
TL;DR Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU. With up to 64 cores, PCIe 4.0 and 8 memory channels, even a single-socket AMD ThreadRipper Pro workstation makes a hell of a powerful machine - if you do it right! Update 1: Since 2021, networks have gotten faster and now…
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Fighting Cancer
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)