The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
If we have a heuristic to guess some value cheaply, we can remove a data dependency in a tight loop using the branch predictor. This allows the CPU to run more instructions in parallel, increasing performance. If this explanation does not make much sense to you, keep reading to learn about some of the magic making…
Surviving 3 years in North Korea as a foreign diplomat was not easy. Living and working in the Hermit Kingdom was certainly the unique experience of a lifetime.
From gene regulatory networks to artificial neural networks
Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen…
About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you can see around 7/7 on that…
Maintaining a resume is not the most interesting use of time. Naturally, when I needed to bring my own up to date, I decided to spend a great deal more time on it and overengineer the process.
I've been playing around with SQLite the last couple of days. I thought I knew a little about SQLite, but I didn't, and am getting my remedial education through an accelerated gauntlet. Some of what …
Best practices and principles to create accurate and reliable software based financial systems.
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
If you’ve read my first post about assembly language, you might expect that this is another post on how to understand assembly language. I will write more about that at some point, but this post is not that. Instead, this post is going to talk about some of the weird things and random trivia I learned while writing an…
Tooting photos on the go from Samsung WiFi cameras with a $20 LTE stick
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
A deep dive on Microsoft's GraphRAG paper found questionable metrics with vaguely defined lift, so I analyzed knowledge graphs in RAG overall using Neo4j vs FAISS
A programming model for spatial canvases
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
continuing with the DNA theme… In Catalyst, a WebAssembly implementation of the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine, there are three linguistic levels in play: Smalltalk, JavaScript (JS), and WebAs…
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
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I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold, and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some mol…
"Screenshots won't get you in", but Chrome DevTools will.
Overview of Python's Package management ecosystem in 2024
Announcing Geomys, a small firm of professional maintainers with a portfolio of critical Go projects.
Goodreads is still providing the worst experience when it comes to book tracking. Oku and Literal tried to create the modern Goodreads alternative users were hoping for. But are they still active?
Last winter, I rode a ski lift alongside a guy who claimed to be a retired Olympic ski tuner. Ski tuning, he said, was all a scam. If you keep your skis dry between days out they’ll stay sharp for their entire lifetime. Don’t get him started on waxing. His specific claim was that skis get blunt from corrosion, and all…
