1981
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
1982
Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
This entry focuses on Wube Software's long-running Factorio Friday Facts; a seven-year labor of love documenting the creation of the titular video game.
1983
What's in email tracking links and pixels?
This investigation into email tracking attempts to deconstruct tracking links and pixels and highlight the data that is being collected. It covers Mailchimp, …
1984
The Mother of All ‘Abandoned’ Airports (2015)
West Berlin's lifeline during the Soviet Blockade, Tempelhof Airport has since become the city’s biggest park. Berliners will fight to keep it that way.
1985
I wrote a linker everyone can understand
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
1986
You Don’t Need Permission
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices t…
1987
GPT-J-6B: 6B JAX-Based Transformer
Summary: We have released GPT-J-6B, 6B JAX-based (Mesh) Transformer LM (Github).GPT-J-6B performs nearly on par with 6.7B GPT-3 (or Curie) on various zero-shot down-streaming tasks.You can try out …
1988
ProPublica's tax story
What happens when journalists don't have any friends in finance to challenge their thinking?
1989
Microsoft Patches Six Zero-Day Security Holes
Microsoft today released another round of security updates for Windows operating systems and supported software, including fixes for six zero-day bugs that malicious hackers already are exploiting in active attacks.
1990
Text Classification by Data Compression
Edit – I posted this on Hackernews and got some valuable feedback. Many brought up the fact that you should be able to reuse the internal state of the compressor instead of recompressing the training …
1991
Real-world CSS vs. CSS-in-JS performance comparison
I took the real app and convert it from Styled Components to Linaria to compare the app performance of CSS-in-JS and normal CSS. Continue reading if you want to know how it went.
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
Engineering a Chess Match
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…
1997
Kelly Criterion – how to calculate optimal bet sizes
So, you’ve probably heard of the Kelly Criterion in the context of gambling or maybe also in the context of investing. When gamblers talk about the Kelly Criterion they are often referring to the idea of sizing your bets, which is the very intuitive idea that if you bet too much of a percentage of your total wealth…
1998
The pedantic checklist for changing your data model in a web application
Let's say you have a web app with some database. In your database you have an Invoice model, where you store things you are charging your customers.
1999
Design Issues in LLVM IR
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
2000
2001
The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
I went down a rabbit-hole analysing a competitor and discovered a black-hat SEO operation involving tens of thousands of websites.
2002
Found at Goodwill: WebPad 1001 Prototype
I found this strange looking device at Goodwill yesterday. Originally, owing perhaps to the bright blue color, I thought it was some sort of educational or kids device. It had no branding on it, so…
2003
Web Applications from the Future: A Database in the Browser
If progress follows it's usual strategy, then whatever is difficult and valuable to do today will become easy and normal tomorrow. I imagine we'll discover new abstractions, which will make writing Google Docs as easy as the average web app is today.
2004
Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
I received an official response from Replit and my open-source project will be back up soon; please see the bottom of the blog post for an update. The rest of the content here will remain as a historical artifact.
2005
How to sequence your genome at home
In this post I'll describe how to sequence a human genome at home, something that's only recently become possible.
2006
“AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing”
Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist . . . Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, “We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the…
2007
Clever vs. Insightful Code
“Don’t write clever code.” Why not? “Because it’s hard to understand.” People who say this think of clever code such as Duff’s Device: Duff's Device send(to, from, count) registershort*to, *from; registercount; { registern =(count +7) /8; switch(count %8) { case0: do{ *to =*from++; case7: *to =*from++; case6: *to…
2008
2009
The Dangers of Low Head Dams (2019)
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
2010
