2491
The future of programming: Research at CHI 2023
Research on programming tools published at CHI 2023.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
2492
Hotspot performance engineering fails
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
2493
A visual book recommender
Recreating the used bookstore experience via contrastive learning, t-SNE, and 100M book reviews.
2494
Listening to Satellites: A Journey with My RTL-SDR V3
How I received the signal of MANY satellites with an RTL-SDR V3
2495
Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them
I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBoo...
2496
The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software
“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many…
2497
Performance excuses debunked
There are many legitimate arguments to be had about performance, but there are also plain old excuses. It's time to end the excuses.
2498
Why did Google Brain exist?
This essay was originally written in December 2022 as I pondered the future of my job. I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared, and last week, Brain and…
2499
Mastodon is doomed?
Mastodon won't be the next Twitter, and it's not because of Bluesky. The ideals and execution won't scale.
2500
Science is a strong-link problem
OR: How to eat fewer asparagus beetles
2501
A guide to prompting AI, for what it is worth
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
2502
Ruby's switch statement is flexible
Ruby's switch statement is very versatile and flexible, especially due to the dynamic nature of Ruby. This post shows how it works with examples.
2503
Gradle still sucks
I wrote a blog post a while ago complaining about Gradle, mostly from a position of ignorance: I had never really taken the time to properly learn the tool and I was frustrated while trying to stumble my way through working with it. But luckily, my company encourages learning and experimentation so I was given an…
2504
Why do prime numbers make these spirals? (2019)
A curious pattern in polar plots with prime numbers, together with discussion of Dirichlet's theorem
2505
You could have invented futexes
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
2506
NitroKey disappoints me
A look at NitroKeys latest article
2507
Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it
Amazon is very proud of its "flywheel": at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the "everything…
2508
Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
2509
Use Gröbner bases to solve polynomial equations
A self-contained introduction to Gröbner bases and solving polynomial systems
2510
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM over SSH
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM file transfers over SSH using Qodem
2511
A non-technical explanation of deep learning
This document will explain what neural networks are and how they work, which will help you understand how AI and machine learning work. In the scenario below you'll play the part of the neural network.
2512
The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
2513
My thoughts on OCaml
Since 2013 I’ve had the chance to use OCaml a few times in different jobs, and I got frustrated and disappointed every time I had to use it. I just don’t enjoy writing OCaml.
2514
Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
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Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren't nice places to work
Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.
2517
Fedora 38 LLVM vs. Team Fortress 2
F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who's at fault? ...
2518
Open Questions
Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying.
2519
Ox
“Why is it called oxtail if it’s from a cow?” I’m glad you oxed. It’s not just a load of bull. Ox is a word that, for many of us, is both familiar and strange. I grew up in ranch cou…
2520
A WiFi color eInk picture frame
A while ago, our little one was born. As unfortunately her (great-)grandparents are located somewhat spread out over the globe, real-life visits can't happen too often. Obviously, video calling is a thing nowadays, so we keep in contact. Still, I wanted everyone to also be able to see her when we weren't online…