1021
How should we evaluate progress in AI?
Improving artificial intelligence research with scientific testing, design practice, and meta-rational choice of methods and criteria
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
1022
Serverless QBasic
My first exposure to programming was on an HP-85 . This must have been around 1992 or 1993; the machine was then already largely obsolete, having been first produced in 1980.
1023
Async and Await in Rust: a full proposal
I’m really excited to announce the culmination of much of our work over the last four months: a pair of RFCs for supporting async & await notation in Rust. This will be very impactful for Rust in the network services space. The change is proposed as two RFCs: RFC #2394: which adds async & await notation to the…
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1025
J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
1026
How to take 7 years to ship a beta
Update (February, 2020): I finally shipped v1.0! Since this post I refactored the engine to support lower-end hardware, finished the macOS…
1027
Differential Synchronization (2009)
Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.
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Taking Go modules for a spin
Update: Since this post was written, Go 1.11beta2 has been released. I’ve updated the setup section to reflect this. Russ Cox kindly wrote to me to explain the reasoning behind storing the Go module cache in $GOPATH . I’ve included his response inline.
1030
Lisp and Haskell (2017)
How I finally decided what is better (for me), Lisp or Haskell?
1031
The hotel bathroom puzzle
In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
1032
Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
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Basics of Futexes
The futex (short for "Fast userspace mutex") mechanism was proposed by Linux contributors from IBM in 2002 [1] ; it was integrated into the kernel in late 2003. The main idea is to enable a more efficient way for userspace code to synchronize multiple threads, with minimal kernel involvement.
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Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
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City street orientations around the world
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
1039
How to build an NPM worm
npm is a registry and package manager for JavaScript that ships as part of Node.js . It's used by tens of millions of people to install hundreds of thousands of packages billions of times every week.
1040
Netdev Day 1: IPsec
netdev day 1: IPsec!
1041
Notorious ‘Hijack Factory’ Shunned from Web
Score one for the good guys: Bitcanal , a Portuguese Web hosting firm long accused of helping spammers hijack large swaths of dormant Internet address space over the years, was summarily kicked off the Internet this week after a half-dozen of the company’s bandwidth providers chose to sever ties with the company.
1042
Show HN: Solving Rush Hour, the 6x6 Sliding Block Puzzle
Rush Hour is a 6x6 sliding block puzzle invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the 1970s. It was first sold in the United States in 1996.
1043
Bringing Blogging to the Fediverse
After much trial and error, I've finished basic #ActivityPub support on Write.as! (Though it's not live yet. Create a federated blog here...
1044
Comparing City Street Orientations
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
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Why Isn't Debugging Treated as a First-Class Activity?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
1047
Random Points on a Sphere
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
1048
Building a Program Synthesizer
Build a program synthesis tool, to generate programs from specifications, in 20 lines of code using Rosette.
1049
Troubling Trends in Machine Learning Scholarship
By Zachary C. Lipton* & Jacob Steinhardt* *equal authorship Originally presented at ICML 2018: Machine Learning Debates [arXiv link] Published in Communications of the ACM 1 Introduction Collectively, machine learning (ML) researchers are engaged in
1050
Writing a Game Boy emulator
I've always wanted to write an emulator from scratch, but I've held off for a long time because it's probably the most advanced programming project I've ever wanted to do.