11011
Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
“Imagine what mistakes might be found in the raw data if anyone was allowed to look!” – Sholto David
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,208 posts.
11012
SaberVM
This post announces SaberVM, an abstract machine for functional programs that guarantees safety, reliability, and portability.
11013
Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
Creating standalone Linux applications with lone.
11014
My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
An adorable set of release notes
11015
Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {}
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
11016
An RNG that runs in your brain
Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia…
11017
Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off
Cloud cost optimization at scale part 1: how we save approx 150k USD a year by simply shutting things off
11018
Forging signed commits on GitHub
Creating fake signed commits
11019
Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?
Today in "our novel form of NIH," why did Bluesky choose not to use a peer-to-peer network when designing the AT Protocol?
11020
GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much
Asking it to repeat "ponyuseRal ponyuseRal ponyuseRal pony" makes API requests fail
11021
11022
How far could the sun possibly be?
The Greeks found the minimum possible distance to the Sun is a few million miles. Today we'll see how the speed of light can provide a maximum distance.
11023
C23: A Slightly Better C
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
11024
11025
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often we talk to customers
Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
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11027
Lessons learned from bringing promotional sweets to a conference
I've recently set up my own consultancy company and decided to sponsor my local UKGovCamp conference. That entitled me to a logo on the site, a shout-out during the conference, and place to put any promotional stickers. Everyone loves stickers! But I decided to bring along something different - promotional sweeties! I…
11028
Keeping a long shell history
Let's talk about shell history.
11029
Collision Detection (2015)
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
11030
Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)
Check the discussion on Hacker News about this post for a lively discourse and more tips! If you’ve used an *nix system, at some point you’ve stumbled upon Midnight Commander, a file manager based on the venerable Norton Commander. You’re probably familiar with the basic operations (F5 for copying, F6 for moving, F8…
11031
Common Lisp's block / return-from and unwind-protect
I was just chatting with Ben Titzer on Twitter about control flow in his Virgil language (which is cool and you should definitely check ...
11032
11033
Investigating a vanishing BIOS on the Fujitsu Lifebook AH532
A few months ago, I got given a laptop with a very interesting condition. The BIOS setup menu was supposedly inaccessible, and nothing apart from the default boot option works. Time to investigate to see what is actually happening and what we can do about it.
11034
The Orange Pi 5 Plus
The launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 was a bit… underwhelming, to be honest. Part of that is because the Raspberry Pi Foundation favors incremental improvement ...
11035
Indexing iCloud Photos with AI Using LLaVA and Pgvector
A straightforward idea, gluing stuff together until it works, but it’s a glimpse of what’s possible with help of local AIs in near future
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11037
Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
11038
Simulating a minimal cell in the browser
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
11039
Let's talk about joins
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
11040
Lowercase letters save data
Lowercase letters and uppercase letters use the same amout of data — 1 byte each.