The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,206 posts.
Programmers on the internet often use Turing-completeness terminology. Typically, not being Turing-complete is extolled as a virtue or even a requirement in specific domains. I claim that most such discussions are misinformed --- that not being Turing complete doesn't actually mean what folks want it to mean, and is…
Oh the merchants2 table? Yeah, we ran out of columns on merchants, so we made merchants2
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
A comedic example, parked nicely on the thinnest wedge of the venn diagram, is the HamFurs – people who do amateur radio while wearing fur suits. While it isn't my cup of tea, I love that such a group exists. They seemed like nice people when I chatted to them.
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
More than a million domain names — including many registered by Fortune 100 firms and brand protection companies — are vulnerable to takeover by cybercriminals thanks to authentication weaknesses at a number of large web hosting providers and domain registrars, new research finds.
So, let's say that a security vendor, we'll call them ClownStrike, accidentally takes down most of their Windows install base with a poorly tested content update. Rough day at the office, huh? There are lots of things you could say about this, lots of reasons it happens this way, lots of people to blame and not to…
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
I will never stop dying on this hill
Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
We show that a system that has only GNU's find and mkdir commands is Turing-complete.
One of Go's advantages is being able to produce statically-linked binaries [1] . This doesn't mean that Go always produces such binaries by default, however; in some scenarios it requires extra work to make this happen. Specifics here are OS-dependent; here we focus on Unix systems.
I think I should blog more about random troubleshooting sessions, if nothing else it will remind me what steps I took when it inevitably happens again!
This is basically a compilation of the lecture notes I wrote when teaching 36-401, Modern Regression, in fall 2015 . I offer it here on the chance that it might be of interest to those learning, or teaching, linear regression. There's no shortage of resources on that, but I have tried to present the subject as though…
GC within a function doesn't work how I expected
Yesterday on Twitter the inimitable Morten Just posted a preview of a tool he’s created that wrap ffmpeg to allow movies, such screen recordings but pretty m...
(or at least work better)
Was the Internet Created for Nuclear War?
I became interested in implementing programming languages a few years ago and discovered [Crafting Interpreters](https://craftinginterpreters.com/) by Bob Nystrom. At the time, I had experience with Rust and decided to use it to follow the book. Albeit, being a noob, I managed to implement a fully functional bytecode…
Silently sends up to 255 bytes of the client's heap to the server . The server must support NPN , and the heap data is encrypted in transit.
Recently, GDM released a great paper titled, Scaling Exponents Across Parameterizations and Optimizers, in which they conduct over 10,000 LLM training runs to obtain optimal hyperparameters under different regimes. After reading it (it was great), I wanted to test my understanding of the paper by tallying up all…
Zig’s reflection combined with Zig’s ability to import C header files means Zig can be used for C macro reflection.
Exploring memory-efficient techniques for LLMs
David Kopec's blog.
