Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
A while ago, I bought the book “ The Go Programming Language ” written by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan. I have always been a fan of Brian Kernighan’s writings. I should admit that I bought the book mainly for his great examples and writings than for the Go language itself, but since then have got interested in the…
The software ecosystem has a lot of useful but unsafe code, and the easier it is to sandbox that code, the moreoften that’ll happen. If it were as simple as ...
August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly…
Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused.
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he…
I’ve seen people be genuinely puzzled about why functional programming is not more popular. For example I’m currently reading “Out of the Tar Pit” where after arguing for fu…
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
The final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal identifies the causes of the blackout and outlines recommendations to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s interconnected electricity system. It was prepared by a technical Expert Panel of 49 members, including…
I switched from Gmail to FastMail a few months ago (in early 2013) and I’ve been meaning to write a post about how I did it.
Popular programming languages provide methods or functions which locate a substring in a given string. In C it is the function strstr , the C++ class std::string has the method find , Python's string has methods pos and index , and so on, so forth. All these APIs were designed for one-shot searches . During past…
A recent paper The Reversal Curse points out an apparent failure in large large language models like GPT-4. From the abstract: We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is
On Saturday 11th March I wrote about how Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment. Today is Monday. Let’s look at what’s happened in the past three days. …
In this post I'm going to show you a simple way to significantly speedup Python numpy compute performance on AMD CPU's when using Anaconda Python.
Rust's error handling is a pleasure to use thanks to the Result type . It ensures Rust's error handling is always correct , visible , and performant . And with the addition of the ? operator in Rust 1.13 , and the addition of return types from main in Rust 1.26 Rust's error handling has only kept improving.
Over the past few months the team at RethinkDB has been working on a project to make building modern, realtime apps dramatically easier. The upcoming features are the start of an exciting new database access model – instead of polling the database for changes, the developer can tell RethinkDB to continuously push…
Earlier this week, Haroen Viaene posted this tweet about YAML: worst part of yaml: https://yaml.org/type/bool.html — Haroen Viaene (@haroenv) January 10, 2022 The linked-to page contains the documentation on what defines a boolean in YAML, and details that it can be parsed using this regex…
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.
“Imagine what mistakes might be found in the raw data if anyone was allowed to look!” – Sholto David
A few days ago, Peter Gramantik from our research team found a very interesting backdoor on a compromised site. This backdoor didn’t rely on the…
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign soldiers. Napoleon's reply was that it's simple: soldiers are either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic. The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what to do and can rally the troops to do it. The smart and lazy I make generals. They
