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916 Days of Emacs
Freedom is a state of mind
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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Mac Keyboard with Hidutil
[Update: 13-Apr-2023 with some of the background context and some things I learned from hackernews ] [Update: 18-Dec-2023] This hiduti...
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Do you need a vector database?
Spoiler alert: the answer is maybe! Although, my inclusion of the word “actually” betrays my bias. Vector databases are having their day right now. Three different vector DB companies have raised money on valuations up to $700 million (paywall link). Surprisingly, their rise in popularity is not for their “original”…
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Kalyn: A self-hosting compiler for x86-64
Over the course of my Spring 2020 semester at Harvey Mudd College , I developed a self-hosting compiler entirely from scratch. This article walks through many interesting parts of the project. It’s laid out so you can just read from beginning to end, but if you’re more interested in a particular topic, feel free to…
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Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
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SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
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I’ve been single all my life
I’m single. I don’t know if this comes as a surprise to you. Of course, you have yet to hear me talking about a wife or a girlfriend. But I also rarely talk about dating and finding someone. The bigger surprise might be that I’m a lifelong single. In other words, I was never in any romantic or sexual relationship…
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On a great interview question
Between 2010 and 2019 I interviewed dozens of Software Engineer candidates at Google. Almost always I asked the same interview question…
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Scaffolded LLMs as natural language computers
Recently, LLM-based agents have been all the rage – with projects like AutoGPT showing how easy it is to wrap an LLM in a simple agentic loop and prompt it to achieve real-world tasks. More generally, we can think about the class of ‘scaffolded’ 1 LLM systems – which wrap...
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Experimenting with LLMs to Research, Reflect, and Plan
Also, shortcomings in document retrieval and how to overcome them with search & recsys techniques.
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Blank turns your TV screen black until you press any button on a remote
I’m happy to announce the release of a new tvOS app called Blank. It turns your screen black and keeps it that way until you press any button on a remote. Seriously, that’s all it does. Here’s the screen you see when you launch the app for the first time: That second paragraph hints at […]
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Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco
Let's not make excuses for Chaos City.
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Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
An exploration into customizing LLMs for personal use
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FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations
The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce…
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Displaying My Washing Machine's Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth
A couple of months ago our washing machine produced a considerable quantity of smoke when I opened its door, which I interpreted as a suggestion that a replacement was needed. After rummaging around the internet for advice, a couple of days later a new Miele washing machine took its place in our home.
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Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)
Wouldn’t you like to live in a world where your monitoring systems only alerted when things were actually broken? And wouldn’t it be great if, in that world, your alerts would always fi…
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GPT-4 gets a B on my quantum computing final exam
Update (April 14): On the suggestion of my TA Justin Yirka, I gave GPT-4 problem 2 from the final exam, along with its own answers and my and Justin’s grading comments, and asked it whether i…
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A Cryptographic Near Miss
A recent issue in scalar multiplication makes for a good case study of how unsafe interfaces, undocumented assumptions, and time lead to vulnerabilities.
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I worked at Google for -10 days
It’s the story of how I was laid off from Google before I even started to do my job there.
2663
The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding
Silver Repair, Restoration, Silver Conservation,…2023147 points79 commentsHardware & Electronics details
Sterling welding with the Lampert PUK04 pulse arc welder.
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Maximizing the Potential of LLMs: A Guide to Prompt Engineering
Language models have rapidly improved in recent years, with large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 taking center stage. These models have…
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Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?
Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors...
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We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible
“How is the SerenityOS team making such good progress on building their Ladybird browser, when we've heard for years that it’s impossible”?
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The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
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Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes
In this article we will learn how to deploy Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. We will first do everything manually with separate YAMLs and then later with Helm. Our k8s environment will run i…