961
Quote Origin: Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
Steve Jobs? Pablo Picasso? T. S. Eliot? W. H. Davenport Adams? Lionel Trilling? Igor Stravinsky? William Faulkner? Apocryphal?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
962
Laser Pointer
If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
963
Mortality Risk of COVID-19
Explore data on the mortality risk of COVID-19 across the world.
964
PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus
University of Waterloo, Fall 2006 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00-2:30pm BFG Building, 2nd floor seminar room (BFG2125)
965
War and Peace
How common are armed conflict and peace between and within countries? How is this changing over time? Explore research and data on war and peace.
966
Taco Bell Programming
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
967
A Few Notes on the Culture, by Iain M Banks
Link to: Main page | About Me | Puzzle | Book Reviews | Essays and Short Stories | Babylon 5 | Space School UK | Gallery | Links
968
The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license
Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about "proof of concept." These rough edges make academics reluctant to release their software. But, that doesn't mean they shouldn't.
969
The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
970
DPI Calculator / PPI Calculator
Noteworthy display sizes of monitors, PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches and HMDs. Link background color takes into account typical viewing distance:
971
PEP 3107 – Function Annotations
This PEP introduces a syntax for adding arbitrary metadata annotations to Python functions 1.
972
No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
973
Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
Inside the complacency and decisions that eroded trust in Azure—from a former Azure Core engineer.
974
The web sucks if you have a slow connection
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were…
975
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
Anthropic research on data poisoning attacks shows a few hundred malicious documents can "backdoor" large language models of any size.
976
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
977
An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
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979
The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama
Ollama gained traction by being the first easy llama.cpp wrapper, then spent years dodging attribution, misleading users, and pivoting to cloud, all while riding VC money earned on someone else's engine. Here's the full history, and why the alternatives are better.
980
Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
981
Google Search Operators: A Complete List (2018)
They're super powerful.
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Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
984
What every computer science major should know (2011)
Given the expansive growth in the field, it's become challenging to discern what belongs in a modern computer science degree.
985
Open Whisper Systems partners with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption
At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. For the past three years, we’ve been developing a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make seamless end-to-end encrypted messaging possible. Today we’re excited ...
986
Nikola: How to Parlay an Ocean of Lies into a Partnership with GM
Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we have taken a short position in shares of Nikola Corp. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
987
A High Frequency Trader's Apologia, Part 1
I'm a former high frequency trader. And following the tradition of G.H. Hardy, I feel the need to make an apology for my former profession. Not an apology in the sense of a request for forgiveness of wrongs performed, but merely an intellectual justification of a field which is …
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Algorithm recovers speech from a potato-chip bag filmed through glass (2014)
Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass.
990
YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection
You only look once (YOLO) is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system. On a Pascal Titan X it processes images at 30 FPS and has a mAP of 57.9% on COCO test-dev.