1681
Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)
Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
1682
1683
Bfs 3.0: The Fastest Find Yet
bfs is a tool I wrote to do b readth- f irst s earch through a filesystem. It started out simply enough, but over the years it’s grown to include almost every feature from every other find implementation I could find, plus many of its own innovations. The new 3.0 release series includes the biggest new feature so far…
1684
Local async executors and why they should be the default
Imagine you are new to Rust and you want to learn some async programming. Writing a chat server is a common way to start, scope is small enough to contain in a blog post, yet it is complex enough to learn most of what you'll need to build async servers in Rust. One DuckDuckGo query and we are off to the races…
1685
Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the LLM-replicate plugin
The big news today is Llama 2, the new openly licensed Large Language Model from Meta AI. It’s a really big deal: Llama 2 is available for free for research …
1686
Payment systems while working at a pizza place
Placing an order and capturing a payment are really different actions. I also learned a lot in a few days.
1687
Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
We have public schools for a reason.
1688
10NES
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
1689
I'm moving my projects off GitHub
It's time for me to leave GitHub behind and move to another forge. I'm not necessarily advocating for anyone else to do the same, but if my reasons resonate with you then you may want to consider it. I also don't expect this post to... matter, if that makes sense [1] . I'm not a major open-source maintainer or…
1690
Ten years of “Go: The good, the bad, and the meh”
I wrote a blog post ten years ago. How do I feel about it now?
1691
Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
1692
Generative AI space and the mental imagery of alien minds
AI and the ruliad in the Wolfram Physics Project provide a new way to consider how alien minds might perceive the world. Stephen Wolfram explains how this artificial neuroscience experiment works.
1693
Statistical Arbitrage – An Easy Walkthrough
Statistical arbitrage (stat arb) is a pillar of quantitative trading that relies on mean reversion to predict the future returns of an asset. Mean reversion believes that if a stock has risen higher it’s more likely to revert in the short term which is the opposite of a momentum strategy that believes if a stock has…
1694
Never waste a midlife crisis
John Higgs on the decision to become a full-time writer.
1695
Coroutines for Go
This post is about why we need a coroutine package for Go, and what it would look like. But first, what are coroutines?
1696
WHO aspartame brouhaha
the territory under dispute
1697
Bringing 19th century ornamental tile illustrations into a 21st century web app
The Internet Archive also archives physical books. The archive’s 2010 scan of a late 19th century catalogue of colourful granite tiles came to my
1698
What's wrong with enterprise Linux
An examination of what is wrong with the Enterprise Linux model and a recommendation for a middle ground.
1699
Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?
The recent paper, “Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors by Jiang et al. [ link ] recently received a lot of attention on twitter.
1700
The C Programming Language: Myths and Reality
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
1701
A Firefox-only minimap (2021)
A quick explanation on how the Firefox-only map is built using the `element()` CSS function.
1702
Notes on Puzzles
1. I mostly don’t play chess anymore — it’s too addictive, and tends to take over your brain in a way I don’t like — but one habit I’ve retained is solving puzzles.
1703
How to be a consultant, a freelancer, or an independent contractor (2009)
This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in…
1704
My broken ThinkPad plays music upon booting
A puzzle with dodgy video recordings, funky spectrograms and deprecated APK's
1705
Using XPath in 2023
In the latest release of htmx , you can add event listeners to elements with hx-on :
1706
Tiffin Tom: Fish, chips and a side of identity theft
Apart from leaking everything, there's been "no breech". Avoid Tiffin Tom.
1707
Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
1708
Underwater ears everywhere
Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am bad at computers (yet another case of "forgot to enable the systemd unit"). It's fixed now. The unsubscribe link was also broken and is now fixed but, you know, maybe that was a feature. Did wonders for reader retention.
1709
How to register a Kei truck in Pennsylvania
Kei trucks are a special designation of Japanese car that have very small engines (660cc) and dimensions (~10m^3). Tell 'em, Wikipedia . Whoever coined the idea of "creative constraints" should take a gander at Kei trucks; there's definitely an upper bound:
1710
A tutorial quantum interpreter in 150 lines of Lisp
a personal blog