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Reflecting on my failure to build a billion-dollar company (2019)
In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life's work...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 791 posts.
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GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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Surprisingly Turing-Complete
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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F-Droid Security Issues
F-Droid is a popular alternative app repository for Android, especially known for its main repository dedicated to free and open-source software. F-Droid is often recommended among security and privacy enthusiasts, but how does it stack up against Play Store in practice? This write-up will attempt to emphasize major…
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Global Perspective on U.S. Health Care
This cross-national comparison of health care systems assesses U.S. health spending, outcomes, status, and service use relative to 12 other high-income countries.
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Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably
Microsoft retrieved the Northern Isles underwater datacenter from the seafloor off Scotland's Orkney Islands. Project Natick is proving the concept of underwater datacenters is feasible as well as logistically, environmentally and economically practical.
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OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Chief technology officer Mira Murati appointed interim CEO to lead OpenAI; Sam Altman departs the company.
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A GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy
Implementing a GPT model from scratch in NumPy.
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Bard and new AI features in Search
Introducing Bard (now Gemini), Google's conversational AI service — plus, new AI features in Search.
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Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on the Internet has a good idea of how prevalent meme usage has become in online discourse. Finding new memes on the latest happening and sharing them with various friend groups to share in the humor is a long-enjoyed pastime of mine. Working in tech and in the InfoSec field has…
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The technology behind GitHub’s new code search
A look at what went into building the world's largest public code search index.
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The tiny corp raised $5.1M
Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank.
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The expanding dark forest and generative AI
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
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Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol
The Signal Protocol is a set of cryptographic specifications that provides end-to-end encryption for private communications exchanged daily by billions of people around the world. After its publication in 2013, the Signal Protocol was adopted not only by Signal but well beyond. Technical informat...
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It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼♂️".length == 7 (2019)
From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for…
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CVE-2020-19909 is everything that is wrong with CVEs
This is a story consisting of several little building blocks and they occurred spread out in time and in different places. It is a story that shows with clarity how our current system with CVE Ids and lots of power given to NVD is a completely broken system. CVE-2020-19909 On August 25 2023, we got … Continue reading…
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Prompt Engineering: Steer a large pretrained language model to do what you want
Prompt Engineering, also known as In-Context Prompting, refers to methods for how to communicate with LLM to steer its behavior for desired outcomes without updating the model weights. It is an empirical science and the effect of prompt engineering methods can vary a lot among models, thus requiring heavy…
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Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript
By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…
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How to Optimize a CUDA Matmul Kernel for CuBLAS-Like Performance: A Worklog
In this post, I’ll iteratively optimize an implementation of matrix multiplication written in CUDA.My goal is not to build a cuBLAS replacement, but to deepl...
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Pipeworld: Spreadsheet Dataflow Computing (2021)
Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projec…
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A guide to home row mods
What are home row mods? What is a mod-tap? What settings do you need to use? What are the alternatives? And more in this article...
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The story of ispc: origins (part 1) (2018)
This one time, at Intel, I wrote a compiler...
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Changes to Unity Plans and Pricing
The latest news and updates related to Unity pricing and subscription plans.
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“Pay or Okay” on tech news site heise.de illegal, decides German DPA
The Data Protection Authority of Lower Saxony (LfD) decided that the “Pay or Okay” solution used by heise.de was unlawful
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If is Evil when used in location context (2015)
Learn how to deliver, manage, and protect your applications using F5 NGINX products.
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Why Software Is Eating the World
Software is eating the world. More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the…