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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
How the Fed “Went Broke”
For the first time in modern history, the Fed is operating at a loss. This article explores what that means for savers and investors.
Cut the Cutesy Errors
If your app has just ruined my day, I need help, not humour.
It Looks Like You’re Trying to Take over the World
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
All the Buns Are Blank
Damn! Remember when these buns had sesame seeds?
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …
From Bing to Sydney
More on Bing, particularly the Sydney personality undergirding it: interacting with Sydney has made me completely rethink what conversational AI is important for.
When Rust hurts
Why I am not enjoying programming in Rust.
Last Flight Out
Good-byes, and the beginning of winter isolation.
Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don't want to publish your app on the Appstore. The provisioning certificate that Xcode provides only lasts one week.
Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
tl;dr: Use an old-fashioned USB 2.0 flash drive, format it FAT32, download the firmware, make sure it's named correctly, and use the motherboard's 'BIOS Flashback' option after powering off the computer. This past week, I devoted far too much time to the task of updating my brand new motherboard's BIOS. It started…
Shrinkflation, SanDisk Style
A cheap USB stick and the marketing around it caused disappointment, more at 11.
PyTorch at the Edge: Deploy 964 TIMM Models on Android with TorchScript
Learn and deploy over 900+ cutting edge PyTorch classification models on Android.
Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
Researcher interested in usable security and privacy.
What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
The case for frameworks
I push back on Alex Russell's "Market for Lemons" post blaming JS frameworks and their advocates for poor mobile web performance. Developers aren't stupid or deceived: React dominates because of rational economics. Frameworks save developer time, enable hiring, and compound via ecosystems. Better frameworks, not fewer…
Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
Friday was my 9 year anniversary of starting as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. Monday I was laid off.
SS United States, the fastest passenger liner ever built
The fastest passenger liner ever built, the SS United States was a joint undertaking by a civilian shipping line and the US Navy. SS United States, rusting away in Philadelphia photo from WikiCommo…
Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
But they are victims of complex societal factors that are beyond their control
Does Google need a new CEO?
Whether it is botched and haphazard layoffs, anti-trust regulators baying for its blood, or opportunistic saber-rattling by long-time rival Microsoft and its outsourced AI unit, OpenAI — 2023 has b…
Pre-seed, seed startups with employees in office have higher revenue growth
This article previously appeared in EIX – Entreprenuers and Innovators Exchange. Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher…
Data Classification: Does Python still have a need for class without dataclass?
Does Python still have a need for class without @dataclass?
An interactive explanation of quadtrees (2014)
The space is divided into four rectangles . Each of those rectangles is divided such that it contains a maximum of four children . Each child is either a point or a smaller rectangle.
Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
Back in May of 2022 I transferred teams at Google to work on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (newsletter announcement). Since then I’ve been working on a variety of projects in the space, including being the primary maintainer on github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption, which is an open source FHE compiler for…
The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.