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iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
One of the most pervasive mistakes I see people using with large language model tools like ChatGPT is trying to use them as a search engine. As with other LLM …
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Own your work
One of the easiest ways to start sharing your work in the form of writing, designs, or photographs is by using the latest trendy platform in that space, especially when everyone else seems to be using it. How many Blogspot sites are you checking these days? They still work, but Google has killed one or two services…
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XUL Layout is gone
So this week I landeda fewpatches thatcompletely removed XUL layout from the Firefox codebase.
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The Joy of Computer History Books
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
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Problems that attract smart people
The roller-coaster that is generative AI keeps chugging on, and for those of us sitting in the audience, it is more than entertaining.
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The roots of Japan's Indian curry
It's been a while since our last post - life got in the way. A big thanks to everyone who reached out! We are now restarting our articles, though we might not always write once a week. If we don't think it's interesting, we won't send it
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Moving from Rust to C++
Note to readers: this is an April Fools post, intended to satirize bad arguments made against Rust. I have mixed feelings about it now, as I think people who understood the context appreciated the humor, but some people were confused. That’s partly because it’s written in a very persuasive style, and I mixed in some…
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15k inserts/s with Rust and SQLite (2021)
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
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The secret life of fsync
Random thoughts on concurrency, databases and…2023124 points62 commentsSystems & Performance details
What kind of durability guarantees fsync system call provides in Linux? Let's find out.
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Clocks and Causality – Ordering Events in Distributed Systems (2022)
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
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PC keyboard hides an interesting secret
I found this keyboard on eBay recently, although it wasn’t quite the one I was looking for I still think it is interesting. Let me show you why. This is the keyboard, and you would be forgiven for…
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German police raid DDoS-friendly host FlyHosting
Authorities in Germany this week seized Internet servers that powered FlyHosting , a dark web offering that catered to cybercriminals operating DDoS-for-hire services, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. FlyHosting first advertised on cybercrime forums in November 2022, saying it was a Germany-based hosting firm that was…
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Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85k and run it in a browser?
I think it’s now possible to train a large language model with similar functionality to GPT-3 for $85,000. And I think we might soon be able to run the resulting …
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Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food
How a snacktime staple embodies a specific cultural moment
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Postgres as a graph database
You don't need Neo4j for graph data. Walking through nodes, edges, and recursive traversals in plain Postgres, with working SQL.
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If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
There’s now an open letter arguing that the world should impose a six-month moratorium on the further scaling of AI models such as GPT, by government fiat if necessary, to give AI safety and …
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Visual programming with Elixir: Learning to write binary parsers (2019)
Visualize binary protocols by building parsers in Elixir.
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Nuclear power is too safe
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. As an experienced developer, ChatGPT …
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SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…
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When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets
SVG Phone Home
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Gmail is killing independent email
Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...
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Programming isn’t coding (2020)
When teaching “programming”, a surprisingly small amount of time is spent actually helping students with logic – and a lot helping them learning & managing programming tools.
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My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM
Spoiler Alert: It absolutely blew our minds
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Why not tell people to “simply” use pyenv, poetry or anaconda
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
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When Google paid websites to promote Firefox
Having grown up in the 2000s, I love discovering that things I presumed were banal back then were, in fact, part of a bigger story.