The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
It’s been a long time since I’ve worked in the field of ML (or what some call AI), and we’ve come a long way from simple text classification to what’s being casually called generative AI today. While the technology has made many advances, the foundational concepts of machine learning have remained analogous over time…
UPDATE: this post unexpectedly ended up on Hacker News and I received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1) that Secure Boot on the RPi as …
In a fun-filled deep dive into a Philip's Hue Color light bulb, I disassembled, analyzed, and ultimately restored it to working order. Over the course of the hack, I dismantled the bulb’s interior,...
I regularly hear people asking which programming language to learn, and then reeling off a list of very similar languages (“Should I learn Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby?”). In response I usually tell them that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they get started. There are fundamentals behind them.
I recently implemented a Brainfuck interpreter in the Crystal programming language and I’d like to share my honest opinion about working in the language.
The objective for this project was to implement a UDP transmitter for use on the RP2040 that would consume zero CPU time. The system described on this webpage is implemented with 3 PIO state machines, 12 DMA channels, and 1 PWM channel. It generates an NLP, performs packet checksum calculations, and performs packet…
img {border-style: groove; border-width: 1px;} I love Autohotkey so much that it keeps me on Windows. It’s the best GUI automation tool out there. Here’s a shortcut that opens my current browser tab in the Wayback Machine: #HotIf WinActive("ahk_exe firefox.exe") >!^s:: { Keywait("RControl") Keywait("RAlt")…
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL. We can use URL parsing as a reasonable benchmark of a system performance. Of course, no single measure ……
I remember how pleasant it was to learn to program in C. There were so many good books explaining not only the language but also the standard library. I devoured both The C Programming Language (K&R) by Kernighan/Ritchie and The Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger. Then came Expert C Programming by Van der Linden and…
AWS EC2 Spot prices have surged since the start of 2023. In this article I investigate this trend, possible causes, and how AWS customers can improve their deployments to get the maximum discount possible.
After many years of development, the Vale compiler just hit its 100,000th line of code.
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Project estimates are a crucial part of project management, helping to predict the time and resources needed for successful completion. Accurate estimates can be achieved through experience, understanding the project's complexity, and using the right estimation techniques. Overestimation can lead to wasted resources…
“lex and yacc” are two terms that are used together so often that they can seem indivisible. lex takes a string as input and divides it up into lexemes (roughly speaking “words”) and yacc takes a sequence of lexemes and parses them. Since some parsing approaches such as recursive descent parsing unify these phases…
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
An update about me, FiveThirtyEight and the future after the Disney layoffs
I share my story about stress and anxiety and how I managed to overcome it. I also share practical tips and resources that will help you begin your healing journey today!
I was always curious about all that bad guys (criminals, drug dealers, hitman’s, thief’s etc.) using not very good and secure communication channels. Forgetting about whole OPSEC stuff. There is a lo
GitHub is dominant in today’s software development industry. Most professional developers interact with software created, maintained, or controlled by GitHub daily.
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
Update 2025: The post below describes ChatGPT and similar LLMs as they functioned at the time of writing in 2023. More recent systems do have a behind-the-scenes “inner monologue” which enables them t
What will GPT unlock for the nerdy kid sitting in a 7th-grade classroom today?
In the very beginning, there was … well, this thing. The OKTO35 Mk1. A machine that could (barely) shoot and scan its own 35mm film movies.
An introduction to using SIMD with Zig
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
As I watched him on stage, I thought about what made him extraordinary. It’s not his voice. He readily admits that his voice isn’t amazing.
In order to protect women, gender nonconforming folks, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community from suffering as my peers and I have, I feel ethically obligated to go public with my ex…
Apple has just released the first of its new Rapid Security Responses (RSRs) for macOS 13.3.1 Ventura. This is indicated as macOS Rapid Security Response 13.3.1 (a), and is just just over 300 MB to…
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
