121
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
122
Making synthesized sounds more acoustic
a blog about music technology
123
Trying chDB, an embeddable ClickHouse engine
A lightweight in-process SQL OLAP engine, powered by ClickHouse.
124
Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
From a person who really shouldn't be giving others advice.
125
Math Team
and other horrible things you do to get into stanford
126
My failed attempt at using a closet as an office
My partner and I both work from home. I'm very thankful for that as we have two young children and a commute would take up the same time we ...
127
CUDA vs. ROCm: A case study
A simple, whitespace theme for academics. Based on [*folio](https://github.com/bogoli/-folio) design.
128
Simulating fluids, fire, and smoke in real-time
Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.
129
The day I started believing in unit tests
Right after getting my degree, I was lucky to be hired into a small but decent R&D department as an embedded software engineer. My first task was to create a Unit Test project and have it run in our build pipeline after compilation. I was not particularly excited about this task, it seemed like busywork to me. I…
130
SVD Image Compression
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a fundamental concept in linear algebra, and it is particularly important in the field of machine learning for tasks such as dimensionality reduction, data compression, and noise reduction.
131
Making my own bed sensor
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if
132
My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter
It turns out that you can't trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
133
RFC 9518 – What can internet standards do about centralisation?
RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.
134
Development slowness in big and legacy applications
Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of…
135
How to unit test code that depends on time
Suppose that the logic of your program depends on time. That is, you need to keep track of when something in the past happened, and what tim...
136
The Illustrated GPT-2: Visualizing Transformer Language Models (2019)
Discussions: Hacker News (64 points, 3 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (219 points, 18 comments) Translations: Simplified Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Turkish This year, we saw a dazzling application of machine learning. The OpenAI GPT-2 exhibited impressive ability of writing coherent and passionate essays…
137
Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
The case for giving programmers private offices with doors — why open offices destroy deep work, how interruptions cost far more than floor space, and what the research actually says.
138
Improving Emacs Isearch Usability with Transient
Emacs incremental search (isearch) has an embarrassingly rich feature set. That said, I rarely use isearch beyond its basics for the twofold reasons: There are many isearch commands that are...
139
Google's True Moonshot
Google could do more than just win the chatbot war: it is the one company that could make a universal assistant. The question is if the company is willing to risk it all.
140
Lessons from a never-ending personal project
I learned things
141
I Love Ruby
I've done a lot in my career. From working on business support software to big backend systems and even robotics. If there's been a consistent through-line to my career, it's the Ruby programming language.
142
3Blue1Brown Calculus Blog Series
Mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, topology, and more.
143
Many options for running Mistral models in your terminal using LLM
Mistral AI is the most exciting AI research lab at the moment. They’ve now released two extremely powerful smaller Large Language Models under an Apache 2 license, and have a …
144
Python, C, Assembly – Faster Cosine Similarity
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.
145
How many CPU cores can you use in parallel?
Figuring out how much parallelism your program can use is surprisingly tricky.
146
Using Zig to Unit Test a C Application
Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design. Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit…
147
Church vs. Curry Types
Static vs dynamic typing debates often flounder because the debators see from two different perspectives without knowing it. Learning to identify the two perspectives can calm the discussion. The tension between the two perspectives has led to Gradual Typing and other technologies.
148
Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.
People pay $0.50-$2.00 for an hour of digital entertainment.
149
Interactive Code Cells
Like Jupyter notebooks, but for any language.
150
Small offline large language model – TinyChatEngine from MIT
BLUF : TinyChatEngine provides an off-line open-source large language model (LLM) that has been reduced in size compared to Llama2. This po...