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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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The bunkbed conjecture is false
What follows is an unusual story of perseverance. We start with a conjecture and after some plot twists end up discussing the meaning of truth. While the title is a spoiler, you might not be able t…
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You Too Could Have Made Curl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCJmAyUr1j4 This is the video recording of my talk with this title, done at February 4, 2024 10:00 in the K1.105 room at FOSDEM 2024. The room can hold some 800 people but there were a few hundred seats still unoccupied. Several people I met up with later have insisted that 10 am on a ……
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What P vs. NP is about
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
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Math from Three to Seven
Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers, Alexander Zvonkin (Moscow Center for Continuing Mathematical Education, 2007).
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Life, death, and retirement
I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason.My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for b…
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Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store
For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconography. I don’t personally agree with this, as Juno is just a web…
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COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
Delving the depths of computing, hoping not to get eaten by wumpus
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Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
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A Local-First Case Study
How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way.
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Web scraping with your web browser: Why not?
You can find plenty of tutorials on the Internet about the art of web scraping (for example, here and here ) and the first things you will learn about are Python and Beautiful Soup. There is no tutorial on web scraping with Javascript in a web browser though you will find browser extensions that claim to do it all…
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OpenAI DevDay 2024 live blog
I’m at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco, and I’m trying something new: a live blog, where this entry will be updated with new notes during the event. See OpenAI DevDay: …
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Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation
The ZSF has posted their own announcement which clearly explains their mission and specifically what the money will be used for. Instead, I want to talk more broadly about why we've decided to support ZSF.
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Is the world really running out of sand?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you have to know the answer right away, it’s no; or at least, my goal with this video is to convince you that the world is not running out of sand. But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be here (right?) and you probably woul
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Sometimes the product innovation is the distribution
Posted on Friday 27 Sep 2024. 748 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.
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Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene
Boris Vallejo is an epic fantasy painter, who has had an immense influence on fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and even the demoscene. Throughout the decades, his works have often been replicated by pixel artists, leading to controversy. I rediscovered Vallejo's great work for myself, looked into the…
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Code Generation in Rust vs. C++26
One of the things I like to do is compare how different languages solve the same problem — especially when they end up having very different approaches. It’s always educational. In this case, a bunch of us have been working hard on trying to get reflection — a really transformative language feature — into C++26…
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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups.
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The best browser bookmarking system is files
(Thanks for getting this on front page of HackerNews!) Along the years I have tested various...
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Phrase matching in Marginalia Search
Marginalia Search now properly supports phrase matching. This not only permits a more robust implementation of quoted search queries, but also helps promote results where the search terms occur in the document exactly in the same order as they do in the query. This is a write-up about implementing this change. This is…
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FFmpeg 7.1 release: a tons of codecs
I'm the president of VideoLAN, one of the lead developers of VLC and a maintainer of open source multimedia projects. I created several startups, was the CTO of scale-ups, and advised startups and VCs.
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A Tour of Hell – Shell scripting Haskell dialect
This set of slides sketches out the implementation of Hell , in technical detail. I do tend to switch between the slides, old code, and the present code, so bear with me. It's more about the ideas. If you want to see a complete implementation, the complete implementation of Hell is one file , which you can look…
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The Dogma of Otherness (1986)
The Dogma of Otherness insists that all voices deserve a hearing, that all points of view have something of value to offer.
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Tips for Building and Deploying Robots
This post is not about research or developing software for robots. Instead it is some tips on how to go about building robots for mass deployment and how to leverage those deployed robots for improving your product.
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NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where …
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Do AI companies work?
The market needs to be irrational for you to stay solvent.