181
An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is a explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 904 posts.
182
Flatpak: A security nightmare – two years later
Flatpak - a security nightmare
183
Catalina is checking notarization of unsigned executables
This is a follow-up to Allan Odgaard's excellent article macOS 10.15: Slow by Design . I want to talk specifically about the first section "Spawning a new Process", because there has been widespread misunderstanding of this. Odgaard provides a simple test to show that the first run of an executable is delayed while…
184
The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
185
GPT-3
May 2020 Gwern.net newsletter: GPT-3 scaling, implications, deep theory; anime GAN updates, and 1 book review.
186
Rust and C++ Interoperability in Chrome
Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust. For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/ Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced.
187
Which GPUs to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
188
Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030
The scientific consensus is clear. The world confronts an urgent carbon problem. The carbon in our atmosphere has created a blanket of gas that traps heat and is changing the world’s climate. Already, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1 degree centigrade. If we don’t curb emissions, and temperatures continue to…
189
Accelerating TensorFlow Performance on Mac
Accelerating TensorFlow 2 performance on Mac
190
Ozymandias
Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those…
191
Division by zero in type theory: a FAQ
How can a theorem prover use the convention that 1/0=0 and still be consistent?
192
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess
From the very beginning of Slack, MySQL was used as the storage engine for all our data. Slack operated MySQL servers in an active-active configuration. This is the story of how we changed our data storage architecture from the active-active clusters over to Vitess — a horizontal scaling system for MySQL. Vitess is…
193
Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought...
194
Introducing MAUI, the .NET Multi-Platform App UI
You can build anything with .NET. It’s one of the main reasons millions of developers choose .NET as the platform for their careers, and companies invest for their businesses. With .NET 5 we begin our journey of unifying the .NET platform, bringing .NET Core and Mono/Xamarin together in one base class library (BCL)…
195
Introducing x64 emulation in preview for Windows 10 on ARM PCs to the Windows Insider Program
Updated 11/16/2021: x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Today, we're releasing the first preview of x64 emulation
196
Apple announces Mac transition to Apple silicon
Apple today announced it will transition the Mac to its custom silicon to deliver industry-leading performance and powerful new technologies.
197
Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020
The report covers 2020 trends in political violence and demonstrations in the US, focusing on the BLM movement.
198
GPUDirect Storage: A Direct Path Between Storage and GPU Memory
As AI and HPC datasets continue to increase in size, the time spent loading data for a given application begins to place a strain on the total application’s performance. When considering end-to-end…
199
Revisiting a 'smaller Rust'
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
200
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing
Explore data on COVID-19 testing across the world.
201
The top 10 causes of death
WHO act sheet on the 10 leading causes of death. In 2023, the 10 leading causes of death accounted for 33 million deaths, or 54% of the total 61 million deaths worldwide. The top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost, are associated with two broad topics: cardiovascular (ischaemic heart…
202
Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
203
AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
Proteins are essential to life, supporting practically all its functions. They are large complex molecules, made up of chains of amino acids, and what a protein does largely depends on its unique 3D structure. Figuring out what shapes proteins fold into is known as the “protein-folding problem”, and has stood as a…
204
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage
There is such a thing as a free lunch
205
Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look
Apple’s launch of macOS Big Sur was almost immediately followed by server issues which prevented users from running third-party apps on their computers. While a workaround was soon found by people on Twitter, others raised some privacy concerns related to that issue.
206
Linux Hardening Guide
Linux is not a secure operating system . However, there are steps you can take to improve it. This guide aims to explain how to harden Linux as much as possible for security and privacy. This guide attempts to be distribution-agnostic and is not tied to any specific one. DISCLAIMER: Do not attempt to apply anything in…
207
Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet
tldr: work has started to make Hyper work as a backend in curl for HTTP. curl and its data transfer core, libcurl, is all written in C. The language C is known and infamous for not being memory safe and for being easy to mess up and as a result accidentally cause security problems. At … Continue reading rust in curl…
208
On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
209
Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
a blog post by @azwinkau
210
A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.