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How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
There is a popular idea that substantial wealth belongs mainly to entrepreneurs. We celebrate founders, investors and business owners so loudly that a career person can begin to believe that employ…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,696 posts.
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How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect
Measuring a commercial spatial audio processor, extracting its stereo impulse responses, and rebuilding the effect as a convolution filter on Linux.
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I'm sorry, but you still have to think
DHH, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, decided to rewrite Campfire Once from Ruby on Rails to Rust. Or rather ask a clanker to do it for him, as he can't stand reading or writing the Rust code himself. After that he added rewrites in other languages , like Elixir and Go.
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The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
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Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking
You all know me, I love exploring new memory safety approaches and blending them together in weird ways.
306
I paid people to try and follow my README
Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a…
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500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter
During the last 3 months, I spent some of my time and tokens decompiling a popular first-person shooter. The goal was not to reach a simple proof-of-concept state. Instead, we really wanted an accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation of the game. The avid reader of my blog might have noticed that I had…
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Build your own decision model
"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass,
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Knuth reward check
Twenty years ago I got a reward check from Donald Knuth.
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Unikernels were hard. key word: were
Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone, the operating system is design debt, and if you care about security you should seriously consider them.
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I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall
Many of us are inconsistent in our economic desires. I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house. Also, I would like to
313
Lobbying is corruption
On lobbying, corruption, and the same animal under two names
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Lobbying
Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept?
316
Telegram Desktop vulnerability allowed any user's file to be stolen
An unescaped separator in Telegram Desktop’s single-instance IPC lets one clicked link read arbitrary files off the disk and send them to the attacker, session files included.
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No Man Is an Island
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
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Ideas aren't getting harder to find (2022)
You can still discover stuff, I promise
319
What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: reliability & AI
[This is a guest post by Thomas Hales. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Mathematicians have been weighing in on what they value ab…
320
I guess I'm using WebP now?
After using the same few image formats for 20+ years, I’m now on the WebP bandwagon. That isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. Now I’m wondering how soon it’ll be before I can use a couple more.
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Why are coding agents so dumb?
Models are getting better and better, while the agents that drive them languish.
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Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
How I got many of my childhood games running again after fighting with old Copy-Protection mechanisms
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100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
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Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more
How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions.
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Programming Isn't Special
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
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Nix wrote half of my debugger
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
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Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
A blog about software craft and quality
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What should we tell our students?
[This is a guest post by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] TL;DR: Keep calm and carry on studying math. I wo…
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OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics
By the time I got out of bed yesterday, I had three people ask me if I'd seen the OpenAI announcement that the Partition Principle does not (...)
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The value of not getting to the point (2015)
I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.