10051
Understanding Stein's Paradox (2021)
An intuitive explanation of the James-Stein estimator.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,208 posts.
10052
Superfest – The almost unbreakable East German Glass (2021)
Originally named ceverit, Superfest was an extremely durable glass patented and developed in 1979 in East Germany to combat excessive glass waste.
10053
Atari's Mike Jang
Some sad news to report on the blog this week. I got word that long-time Industrial Designer at Atari coin-operated division, Mike Jang, has passed away. I’ve known Mike since 2016, and whils…
10054
How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
For the last several decades, one avenue of technological progress has towered over nearly everything else: semiconductors.
10055
The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)
A decade-long effort to build a machine to unlock the promise of nuclear fusion fell victim to budget constraints and competing science, and was shut down the day it was dedicated. It was never turned on.
10056
I don't want to fill out your contact form
This is my personal blog, where I write solely in my personal capacity. It does not represent the positions of any organisations I'm associated with.
10057
A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair
It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could use a cheese…
10058
I joined landlord groups to persuade them to be better people to their tenants
1 sites already link to thisisalot.com, after 2 years online. Listed at $195 — keep the equity.
10059
How hard can generating 1024-bit primes be?
On the one hand they are easy to explain, they are just numbers that have no factors other than one and themselves, but on the other hand they contain endless complexity. They show up in numerous places, ranging from mathematical concepts and conjectures to interesting looking visualizations and cryptography…
10060
Evidence of price-fixing in the oil industry?
The FTC just found evidence that American oil companies colluded with the Saudi government to hike gas prices, costing the average family $3,000 last year. The question is, what can we do about it?
10061
Turning AirPods into a fitness tracker
A fun side project for a great cause featuring Core Motion, SwiftUI, a little help from AI, and a pair of AirPods to count 100 push-ups a day.
10062
Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that's not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There's no way that other thing makes sense.
10063
Using a LLM to compress text
Introduction Large language models are trained on huge datasets of text to learn the relationships and contexts of words within larger documents. These relationships are what allows the model to generate text. Recently I've read concerns about LLMs being trained on copyrighted text and reproducing it. This got me…
10064
Data Science at the Command Line, 2nd Edition (2021)
This thoroughly revised guide demonstrates how the flexibility of the command line can help you become a more efficient and productive data scientist. You’ll learn how to combine small yet powerful command-line tools to quickly obtain, scrub, explore, and model your data. To get you started, author Jeroen Janssens…
10065
I’m writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
sqlite-vec is an new vector search SQLite extension, coming soon!
10066
More info about synonyms at Google (2010)
Steve Baker, an engineer in the search quality group at Google, just did a nice post about synonyms on the Google blog. A lot of people seem to think that Google only does simple-minded matching of…
10067
Making a 3D modeler in C in a week
The origin story of a 3D Modeler made very quickly
10068
Piccolo – A Stackless Lua Interpreter
piccolo is an interpreter for the Lua language written in pure, mostly safe Rust with an eye towards safe sandboxing and resiliency. It uses gc-arena for its garbage collection system, and in fact gc-arena was originally created as part of piccolo .
10069
10070
The business of wallets
How digital wallets work, and how payment costs drive a lot of product decisions inside and around them.
10071
Rewriting the Technical Interview (2020)
Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not…
10072
The world's loudest Lisp program to the rescue
Programming blog of Eugene
10073
Cognition: A new antisyntax language redefining metaprogramming
Other languages are inflexible and broken. Let's fix that.
10074
Hacking on PostgreSQL is hard
Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might poin...
10075
The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO spec, breaking e.g. KDE apps
How it shall look… Linux & BSDs Windows macOS State on Fedora 40 Workstation & XFCE Spin… Screenshots taken from the GNOME bugtracker, copies to not stall their GitLab instance. I think that is rather unpleasant and for e.g. the left icon-only border just an unusable insult.
10076
The LaserDisc
The first mass market optical media
10077
Invisible Stitch: Generating Smooth 3D Scenes with Depth Inpainting
We introduce a depth completion network that allows generating geometrically coherent 3D scenes, and present a new benchmarking scheme for scene generation methods that is based on ground truth geometry.
10078
LLMs can't do probability
I've seen a couple of recent posts where the writer mentioned asking LLMs to do something with a certain probability or a certain percentage of the time. There is a particular example that stuck in my mind which I've since lost the link to (If you're the author, please get in touch so I can link through to you): The…
10079
10080
How to install Linux from a Windows installer
I'm not sure why you would want to do this. Presumably for the same reason as me? I also don't know what that was.