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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,219 posts.
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How to make decisions like a poker player
Thinking in bets is a decision-making framework developed by poker player Annie Duke. Here's how it can make you a better decision-maker:
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Installing a payphone in my house
When I was growing up in the 90s, I remember wanting to get on the Internet. My parents weren’t going to help me, so I called up an ISP and said I wanted to set up an account. They asked for my name and I gave them a fake name. And then they asked for a credit card number and I told them I had to find my wallet and…
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How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
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Some thoughts on machine learning with small data
I feel techniques for making machine learning work with small data are not talked about enough. This makes sense because many ML applications are only possible by collecting a huge amount of data. …
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Ceiling Air Purifier
Imagine a high-capacity air filter that is extremely quiet and doesn't get in the way. I think I see how to build one; here's a prototype: By putting a fan on the ceiling you can have very long blades. This is important for keeping noise down: the longer your blades are the more air you move at a given rotational…
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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
Or How Competition Returns to Elite Colleges
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Why are maps so hard to make?
Announcing Felt's public launch and $15M Series A. Maps are fun now! Margins is back!
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Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
After about a decade of dealing with this madness, surely it's been worthwhile? No, not really.
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The First Lisp Compiler
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
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High-Throughput, Formal-Methods-Assisted Fuzzing for LLVM
Mutation-based fuzzing is based on the idea that new, bug-triggering inputs can often be created by randomly modifying existing, non-bug-triggering inputs. For example, if we wanted to find bugs in a PDF reader, we could grab a bunch of PDF files off the web, mutate them by flipping a few bits or something, and feed…
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My Mega65 has arrived
This week I returned from a business trip overseas for the past few weeks. This is why I haven't been able to blog this month until now. But...
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What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too.
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Gmail accepts forged YouTube emails
This morning I woke up to an official-looking email from YouTube in my inbox, addressed to an address that isn't mine.
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Thin Platforms
The Microsoft and Stripe developer keynotes were both examples of the rise of Thin Platforms
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XMODEM in 2022
Let's start at the beginning: it all started with me trying to boot a system which receives its initial ramdisk over XMODEM.
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So I took a corporation to arbitration
I'm Shu. This site is mainly to document long distance running while on a ketogenic diet. Sometimes there are posts about technology.
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So long, home T1 line; hello, hacking the T1 router
Floodgap has had a T1 line since I moved into this house in 2011. I'm one of those weirdos who runs my own hardware and prefers to avoid ...
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The Scaling Hypothesis (2021)
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
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Friendships form via shared context, not shared activities
You’re one among millions, not one in a million.
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What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?
Why did the oracle of Delphi go into a trance state? Does it have anything to do with ethylene?
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Programming in the Apocalypse
A climate change what-if Over a few beers... Growing up, I was obsessed with space. Like many tech workers, I consumed everything I could find about space and space travel. Young me was convinced we were on the verge of space travel, imagining I would live to see colonies
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A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs
The Threading library Starting in Emacs 26 some very ambitious changes were added. Basic thread support was enabled, laying the groundwork for a future concurrent emacs. The docs layout this possibility: Emacs Lisp provides a limited form of concurrency, called threads. All the threads in a given instance of Emacs…