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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
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Quitting Caffeine
As I write this, I have been off of caffeine for two years. I had my last caffeinated beverage on August 13, 2015. Here are my experiences with quitting caffeine and what I’ve learned:
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Text Is Keeping Kids from Coding
We ran into a big blocker when designing SpriteBox Coding, a learn-to-code game for kids ages 5+. For some kids, code was simply…
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The Uber Dilemma
Benchmark’s lawsuit against Uber is extraordinary; that is because Uber, despite everything, remains an extraordinary company. Game theory explains the implications.
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It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar
While many musicians start learning the guitar at an early age, there are also many excellent guitar players who start out in their 30s, 40s and even 50s.
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Papers I like (part 2)
Continued from part 1. Once I was about a thousand words into describing background for GEMM, it became pretty clear that it made more sense to group the numerical math papers into one post, so her…
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Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
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An Intro to Compilers
A compiler is just a program that translates other programs. Traditional compilers translate source code into executable machine code that your computer understands. (Some compilers translate source code into another programming language. These compilers are called source-to-source translators or transpilers.) LLVM is…
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If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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A Review of Perl 6
[ Update , Feb. 5, 2020: Perl 6 is now called Raku. I’ve updated the review title, but left the review body intact. ]
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Coding Machines
After a minute Patrick came back with a small dusty cardboard box. Dave and I stared as Patrick opened it and pulled out a network switch, the old kind from the days when they were made with metal cases. He plugged in the power supply and carefully straightened out a CAT -5 cable to hook the switch up to our network…
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We need to document macOS
macOS is now largely undocumented. It’s time to do the job ourselves: what about an open collaborative project?
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Memories of Kurt Gödel
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
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Worldbuilding
There is a grand tradition of scientifically minded science fiction authors creating not just the characters in their novels but also the brass tacks scientific details of the planets they reside on. This is the art and science of Worldbuilding .
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Annual note to self: most of the world exists outside the tech bubble
Annual note to self – most of the world exists outside the tech bubble. —– We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato fa…
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Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
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Papers I like
This started out on Twitter and I expected having to write up maybe 50 or so, but then it made the rounds. I don’t think I have 1200+ papers that I’d recommend reading, and even if I di…
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Predict the future with Machine Learning
Learn Machine Learning (ML) and be ahead of the pack in the Software industry. Machine Learning is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (A.I), which is heavily used in modern software systems. Machine Learning algorithms can improve software (a robot) and it's ability to solve problems through gaining experience and…
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Safari Should Display Favicons in Its Tabs
It might sound silly if you’re not a heavy user of browser tabs, but I am convinced that the lack of favicons is holding back Safari’s market share.
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Why our outdated brains are making us unhappy
Why your outdated brain is making you unhappy and how to hack it.
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Confession of a so-called AI expert
[Twitter thread, Hacker News discussion, Le Monde]
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Brief thoughts on the “Google memo”
(I wrote this in reference to this memo and the ensuing uproar) First off, his argument had some flaws. For example, even if he was correct about personality differences between men and women being…