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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,213 posts.
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How to Beat Stress and Anxiety
Why do we feel stressed and what to do to calm down before an important event (managing anxiety, worry, and stress)
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QOA, the Quite OK Audio Format
Audio formats typically fall into one of three categories: “lossless” , “complicated” or “bad” . After developing a simple image format last year, I tried to come up with an audio format that fits neither of these categories.
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Estimating square roots in your head
Imagine we want to compute the square root of a number n n n . The basic idea of Heron’s method , named after the mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, is to find a number g g g that is close to n \sqrt{n} n and to then average that with the number n / g n/g n / g , which corrects for the fact that g g g…
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The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation
Should AI systems treat different demographic groups unequally?
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WiFi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it (2014)
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
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Humans Need Play
On a vicious pattern that breeds burnout.
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C was not created as an abstract machine
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Anki and GPT-3
Tools for thought, programming, games, homeschooling, and learning
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For police PR flacks, quack lives matter
Police seem to be heroically rescuing baby ducks . . . pretty much everywhere
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Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s
During an online wasp identification course I participated in several weeks ago, there was a fun discussion about whether commercially-produced figs contained fig wasps (Agaonidae, in the Chalcidoidea). Opinions varied, plus some asserted, as do many internet pages, that even if wasps were once insi
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ChatGPT is a bullshit generator but it can still be amazingly useful
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce
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A novel PayPal scam
This morning I received an interesting scam email. It might not be a new scam, but it was the first time I’d seen it.
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Reflections on My Decade at Sumo Logic
Debug, simplify and execute.
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Python's “disappointing” superpowers
A response to Hillel Wayne’s “I am disappointed by dynamic typing”
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A manifesto on shower temperature control
I had a very shower-y shower thought: why does turning my shower handle a tiny bit make such a huge difference in the comfort of the shower? Why are we wasting so much potential control area on water temperatures that no one wants? Who cares about ice...
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Why are online recipes so long-winded?
A chilly recipe for boredom
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Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing (2017)
My friend gave me permission to hack her, here's how I did it and how to stop it happening to you.
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LLM discourse needs more nuance
With this write-up, I want to outline my current thinking around large language models like OpenAI's chatGPT.
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Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
I read this recently and it got me thinking:
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I've had bad luck with transparent hugepages on my Linux machines
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Why Finland Selected the F-35A (2021)
Back in 2017 I was fortunate enough to travel to RAF Lossiemouth together with a bunch of Finnish media courtesy of BAE Systems to get up and close with the Eurofighter Typhoon group operating ther…
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Combobulate: Structured Movement and Editing with Tree-Sitter
Combobulate is a package that adds advanced structured editing and movement to many programming modes in Emacs. Here's how it works, and how it can enrich your editing experience in Emacs.
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Reducing Go execution tracer overhead with frame pointer unwinding
The Go Execution Tracer (aka runtime/trace) was designed to achieve low enough overhead to be usable on “a server in production serving live traffic”. This is achieved by writing events into per-P buffers, using RDTSC for timestamps, and encoding into a relatively efficient binary format.
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Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow
Old law proposes to turn the Bay Area's zoning system into something like Japan's in just two days.
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Is AM radio dead?
...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience! I recorded that video during my convalescence at my parents' house (I am…
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