New

The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
1684

Making TRAMP faster

I recently changed jobs and found myself in a position where I would need to do a lot of work on remote machines. Since I am Emacs user, the most common way to do this is using TRAMP (Transparent Remote access, Multiple Protcol). TRAMP is an Emacs package that let’s you treat a remote host like a local system, similar…

1691

Minimal Boolean Formulas (2011)

28 . That's the minimum number of AND or OR operators you need in order to write any Boolean function of five variables. Alex Healy and I computed that in April 2010. Until then, I believe no one had ever known that little fact. This post describes how we computed it and how we almost got scooped by Knuth's Volume 4A…

1693

Homegrown Closures for Uxn

For a week or so now, I've been writing niënor , a "lispy environment for uxn" . I did not want it to become a full-blown lisp but just another way of writing uxntal . Uxntal is a bit too dense for my liking, and I prefer lisp/scheme s-expression syntax. Niënor is just a compiler and a macroexpander that takes in…

1698

The Humble Programmer (1972)

As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…

1707

Q-learning is not yet scalable

Over the past few years, we've seen that next-token prediction scales, denoising diffusion scales, contrastive learning scales, and so on, all the way to the point where we can train models with billions of parameters with a scalable objective that can eat up as much data as we can throw at it. Then, what about…