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XUL Layout is gone
So this week I landeda fewpatches thatcompletely removed XUL layout from the Firefox codebase.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,299 posts.
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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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The effects of wealth on (Swedish) marriage and fertility
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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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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Humanness in the Age of AI
A path to an open and permissionless identity protocol.
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A new era of transparency for Twitter
At Twitter 2.0, we believe that we have a responsibility, as the town square of the internet, to make our platform transparent. So today we are taking the first step in a new era of transparency.
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ChatGPT – The Revolutionary Bullshit Parrot
ChatGPT seems convincing and wise but is neither wise nor hallucinatory—just bullshit. Here’s biased take on AI’s socalled revolution.
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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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BigQuery prices increasing by more than 100% for many users
New BigQuery pricing editions and autoscaling let you choose the right price-performance for your workloads, and pay for only what you use.
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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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Nim 2.0.0 RC2
The second release candidate (RC2) for Nim version 2.0 is ready for testing.
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Pairing With GPT-4
GPT-4 won't build your application for you, but it can be a very helpful addition to your toolbox.
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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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Helix 23.03
A post-modern modal text editor.
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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 …