The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,207 posts.
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
It’s more than rails!
A major caveat in tools like sudo and doas for that matter is that they rely on setuid binaries and privilege escalation in order to run commands as root.
Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a fortune from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that the rate for a stream heard by one person…
Neural radiance fields provide state-of-the-art view synthesis quality but tend to be slow to render. One reason is that they make use of volume rendering, thus requiring many samples (and model queries) per ray at render time. Although this representation is flexible and easy to optimize, most real-world objects can…
Not much is known about Benjamin Thorpe (1782-1870), yet he was one of the first scholars to publish voluminous editions and translations of Old English texts. This blog provides an overview of Tho…
I was talking with someone today that really really wanted the sqrtps to be used in some code they were writing. And because of a quirk with clang (still there as of clang 18.1.0), if you happened to use -ffast-math clang would butcher the use of the intrinsic. So for the code: __m128 test(const __m128 vec) { return…
Acknowledgements First, I would like to acknowledge my friends and kind internet strangers who helped me with this post. This post heavily adapts from ...
Dmitry.GR: Wireless picture frames that run for years on batteries
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
Can anyone solve 1000 Opus Magnum puzzles in 24 hours? What about with assistance from bots? Will the solutions be any good? Let's find out!
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency.
Summer of Math Exposition 3 - How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
A ubiquitous pattern you won’t find in your textbook.
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views…
XNU kernel buffer overflow, introduced in macOS 14.0 and fixed in macOS 14.5.
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
The Atari 520ST was released in the US in July 1985, but because Atari did not provide magazines with pre-production models (like Commodore did with the Amiga), it took a while before magazine reviews appeared.
When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…
One weird hobby of mine is reasonable properties of cryptographic schemes that nobody promised they do or don’t have. Whether that’s invisible salamanders or binding through shared secr…
Coming back to JavaScript and TypeScript after a few years neck deep in Python and Hack, I kept hitting a number of new, cryptic errors when running NodeJS code in my dev environment:
In a previous article I've done the 'Hello, world!' of GUIs in assembly: A black window with a white text, using X11 without any libraries, just talking directly over a socket.
About a year ago I blogged about games that use curl. In that post I listed a bunch of well-known titles I knew use curl and there was a list of 136 additional games giving credit to curl. Kind of amazing that over one hundred games decided to use curl! At the time, lots of … Continue reading Inside 22,734 Steam games…
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
This post is meant to guide you through some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with multi-terabyte datasets. The lessons shared are focused on what someone may face as the size of the…
