1981
Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
1982
1983
How RLHF Works
Why RLHF may still win out and why we haven't seen it yet in open-source.
1984
Cookie Clicker saved my PhD
Or, how I cookie-clicked my way to a doctorate in interaction design. It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. on user interfaces for machine learning. To celebrate/commiserate, I’m sharing an u…
1985
1986
A case for toe socks
I love toe socks and I think you should too
1987
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
1988
The Almost Romance Languages
If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbre…
1989
Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
A blog about free software and programming
1990
A regular expression to check for prime numbers (2007)
Regular expressions are extremely powerful. This is something I read at least once or twice every day while reading articles and blogs on the Web.
1991
ASU: The New American University (2021)
I had the pleasure of stumbling upon the work of Michael Crow, Arizona State University’s president, earlier this year, and I so enjoyed his thoughts on knowledge production that I immediately wondered how his philosophy would translate to ASU as an organization. Turns out, President Crow was many steps ahead of me…
1992
A Bayesian view of Amazon resellers (2011)
I was buying a used book through Amazon this evening. Three resellers offered the book at essentially the same price. Here were their ratings: 94% positive out of 85,193 reviews 98% positive out of 20,785 reviews 99% positive out of 840 reviews Which reseller is likely to give the best service? Before you assume it's
1993
Compiling Typed Python
With a little effort, you can make your mypy-typed Python go zoom.
1994
Comparing Adobe Firefly, Dalle-2, and OpenJourney
“🔄 Update: after posting this on HN, some commenters provided Stable Diffusion and Midjourney results as well which are now included.” In the recent Photoshop Betas, users are now able...
1995
Things I wish I’d known before fulltime RVing (2017)
Pre-Post Note/ Nov 2017. Although this post was written in 2011 it’s still my most popular post ever (!!), so I’m refreshing it as part of our 8th year on the road. See my updates in it…
1996
Style your RSS feed
How to make your RSS feed look nice and provide useful information at the same time.
1997
Hashing
A visual, interactive introduction to hash functions.
1998
I give up on free software phones (2019)
A blog about free software and programming
1999
“Exit traps” can make your Bash scripts more robust and reliable (2013)
There is a simple, useful idiom to make your bash scripts more robust - ensuring they always perform necessary cleanup operations, even when something unexpected goes wrong. The secret sauce is a pseudo-signal provided by bash, called EXIT, that you can trap ; commands or functions trapped on it will execute when the…
2000
The Federated App Problem
Federated applications have a few problems. And I really wish it weren’t the case, I love the idea and philosophy of these applications. But I can’t see them being mass adopted.
2001
Gopher Wrangling: Effective error handling in Go
When programming in Go, the amount of error handling is something that slaps you in the face. Most API’s you deal with will expose errors. It can become overwhelming, but with a few tips and a guiding principle we can make handling errors easy, keep our code clean and give you the confidence that nothing is breaking…
2002
MVC Isn’t MVC
In December of 1979 Tyrgve Reenskaug, an employee of Xerox PARC, published a paper called MODELS-VIEWS-CONTROLLERS about a design pattern he had invented for developing applications with a graphica…
2003
Eight days later: Kbin, Lemmy, the landed gentry, and the rise of “threadiverse”
Draft! Work in Progress! Feedback welcome!
2004
Theseus DHT Protocol (2018)
A distributed hash table with unusually strong security properties
2005
Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language
Sometimes we have ideas that are bad but demand to enter reality. A few months ago, while chatting with a friend, we toyed around with the idea of a language where the only control flow you get is error handling. This idea embedded itself in my brain and wouldn't let me go, so I kept just talking about it until two…
2006
Plain text journaling in Vim
oppiliappan's μsings
2007
We need more of Richard Stallman's ideas, not less
We need more of Richard Stallman, not less par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
2008
Bit Hacking (with Go code)
At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in 'registers' and not individual bits. Thus a programmer must know how to manipulate the bits within a register. Generally, we can do so while programming with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit integers. For…
2009
Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
2010
AI has poisoned its own well
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can…