The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
In my previous role, I supported a Java service that operated similarly to RDP or Citrix by enabling remote UI functionality. This service relied on sessions, which consisted of interconnected Java objects that were supposed to be cleaned up either when a user logged out or after a predetermined timeout period.
Kevin Yank’s website
People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al) . Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up…
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation," a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:
Why human societies developed so little during 300 000 years
Posts and writings by Nical
Building a database in the 2020s
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Pay attention to how people are talking about freedom. It's a leading indicator of cultural (and economic) trends.
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the …
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
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In short, I believe I've found a longer straight line without crossing a public road than the line identified by Ordnance Survey in 2019. Im...
Note: The focus of this article is to explain the process of reverse engineering, and it is not continually updated to reflect ongoing changes in Facebook APIs. If you are looking for updated details, consider basing your work on open-source projects like mautrix/meta , which is developed by my employer Beeper .
A metaphor involving parking meters. Over the years, parking meters in town have evolved into a cumbersome, awkward system. Coins are heavy and you need to have them handy, meters need to be reinfo…
You can't handle it! In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to the idea of hyper-rationality. I think it was under another name (to be g...
Web publication for "PureJaxRL"
Fear, FOMO, and the scientific exodus driven by ChatGPT
Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about th…
Today's guest is Douglas Crockford. He's sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript's good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there's a better way to build software. This is foundational stuff for the…
I’ve been on a C kick recently as I learn the intricacies involved in low level programming. As a Data Scientist/Python Programmer I work with strings all the time. People say that handling strings in C range anywhere from tricky to downright awful. I was curious so I decided to see how deep the rabbit hole went.
Some people have asked me why I blog and why I value writing in general. These are my reasons, in roughly decreasing order of importance to me.
Lerp is the nickname for Linear Interpolation between two points. It's a fairly simple effect to implement but can really improve the look of your animations if you're moving an object from a point A to point B.
By now, you have probably heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or any of the alternatives GPT-3, GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Facebook’s LLaMa or even Google’s Bard. They are artificial intelligence programs that can participate in a conversation. Impressively smart, they can easily be mistaken for humans, and are skilled in a…
In this post, we will discuss the challenges of programming with locks and how the C++ language offers some useful tools to make it easier. We will start with an example in C and then use C++ to improve upon it in steps. The example APIs are based on real-life APIs from the SerenityOS kernel.
