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Why is Chile so long?
Chile is so long, it's curved. How long is it? Why not longer? Why is no other country as thin? How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,206 posts.
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How random are TOTP codes?
I'm pretty sure that the 2FA codes generated by my bank's TOTP app have a bias towards the number 8 - because eight is an auspicious number. But is that just my stupid meaty brain noticing patterns where none exist? The TOTP algorithm uses HMAC, which in turn uses SHA-1. My aforementioned brain is not clever enough to…
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Trying Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks in Practice
There's been a fair bit of buzz about Kolmogorov-Arnold networks online lately. Some research papers were posted around claiming that they offer better accuracy or faster training compared to traditional neural networks/MLPs for the same parameter count.
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The History of Machine Learning in Trackmania
Trackmania: the world's most competitive racing game. In this post, we begin our journey towards training a neural network to superhuman performance, by chronicling the history of previous attempts.
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Booting Linux off of Google Drive
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create...
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Should this be a map or 500 maps?
500 priests, cartographic n00bism, and the limits of scale
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Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
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Code reviews do find bugs
There’s some 2015 research out of Microsoft titled Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs 1 1 Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs; How the Current Code Review Best Practice Slows Us Down ; Czerwonka, Greiler, Tilford; IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering; 2015. which seems strangely named because reviewers do find…
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A proof of proof by infinite descent
WARNING: the following contains a whole lot of pedantry about proving theorems at a level of detail such that you could likely convince a co...
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Working Title (Insurance)
Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?
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Writing HTML by hand is easier than debugging your static site generator
As someone who has used a static site generator every day at work for years I am on the threshold of believing “actually just writing HTML by hand is probably easier” This becomes obvious when you …
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My Python code is a neural network
This post translates a Python program to a recurrent neural network. It visualizes the network and explains each step of the translation in detail.
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My finetuned models beat OpenAI's GPT-4
Finetunes of Mistral, Llama3 and Solar LLMs are more accurate for my test data than OpenAI’s models.
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Cities need more trees
A case for planting more trees in urban areas.
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Programmers should never trust anyone, not even themselves
Programmers should be paranoid.
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A better merge workflow with Jujutsu
A merge workflow for activating multiple branches simultaneously using Jujutsu, an alternative VCS to Git.
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Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews
Most people want to work for your company for money, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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Four lines of code it was four lines of code
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
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Integrated assembler improvements in LLVM 19
Within the LLVM project, MC is a library responsible for handling assembly, disassembly, and object file formats. Intro to the LLVM MC Project, which was written back in 2010, remains a good source to understand the high-level structures. In the latest release cycle, substantial effort has been dedicated to refining…
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Conway's Game of Life for curved surfaces (2012)
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular and iconic cellular automata. It is so famous that googling it loads up a working simulation right in your browser! The rules for the Game o…
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A Model of a Mind
This article explains a simple model of how minds might work. I’m motivated by the success of AI-based language models to look at the future of digital minds. I’ll present a conceptual data-flow architecture that can account for several key features of minds: the ability to initiate actions (agency), learning…
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Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)
The GoodWatch is my replacement circuit board for Casio’s modern calculator watches, adding support for 70cm and 33cm amateur bands while retaining three years of battery life and most of the watch’s features. It uses the CC430F6147 chip from Texas Instruments, and the watchband forms an untuned random wire antenna…
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Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…
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Unification in Elixir
Pattern matching is a pervasive and powerful tool in Elixir. This isn't too surprising if you know a little about the history of Elixir's parent language, Erlang. Erlang was originally inspired by and written in Prolog, a logic programming language where pattern matching has first-class support. In
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A simplified Python simulation of diffusion
Understanding the real world is not always easy. A Python simulation can help. And let's find ways of making it efficient, too.
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The weirdest QNX bug I've encountered (2021)
I am responsible for the reliability of the firmware updates on our devices and this work never gets boring. The thing about firmware updates is that by definition, every bug is caused by the updater because before installing the affected version, the bug was not present. You could say that updates are the cause and…