4741
Build a search engine, not a vector DB
Don’t confuse embeddings with memory. To build effective RAG, start with a search engine, not just a vector database.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,820 posts.
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Vulkan video extensions for accelerated H.264 and H.265 encode
In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as ‘Vulkan Video’ which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the…
4743
CUDA vs. ROCm: A case study
A simple, whitespace theme for academics. Based on [*folio](https://github.com/bogoli/-folio) design.
4744
Simulating fluids, fire, and smoke in real-time
Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.
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The day I started believing in unit tests
Right after getting my degree, I was lucky to be hired into a small but decent R&D department as an embedded software engineer. My first task was to create a Unit Test project and have it run in our build pipeline after compilation. I was not particularly excited about this task, it seemed like busywork to me. I…
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All code is technical debt
As adding more code to a product will slow down development, we should view all code as technical debt.
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Hardware Intrinsics in .NET 8
.NET 8 includes significant improvements to the Hardware Intrinsics feature.
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Development slowness in big and legacy applications
Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of…
4749
How to unit test code that depends on time
Suppose that the logic of your program depends on time. That is, you need to keep track of when something in the past happened, and what tim...
4750
Qt 6.6 and 6.7 Make QML Faster Than Ever: A New Benchmark and Analysis
The Qt Quick Compiler has learned a few new tricks recently that can make your QML code run a lot faster.
4751
The Illustrated GPT-2: Visualizing Transformer Language Models (2019)
Discussions: Hacker News (64 points, 3 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (219 points, 18 comments) Translations: Simplified Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Turkish This year, we saw a dazzling application of machine learning. The OpenAI GPT-2 exhibited impressive ability of writing coherent and passionate essays…
4752
Improving Emacs Isearch Usability with Transient
Emacs incremental search (isearch) has an embarrassingly rich feature set. That said, I rarely use isearch beyond its basics for the twofold reasons: There are many isearch commands that are...
4753
PostgreSQL 16 Bi-Directional Logical Replication
Introduction In this blog, we'll be going over some more advanced topics new in Postgres 16. Having some experience with Linux, Postgres, and SQL is necessary as we'll not only be going over these new features but also how to implement them. This blog was written using PostgreSQL 16 (Development Version) running on…
4754
Ruby 3.3's YJIT: Faster While Using Less Memory
This year, the YJIT team has been working hard to improve and optimize YJIT. We’re proud to say that the version of YJIT to be included with Ruby 3.3 is leaps and bounds ahead of Ruby 3.2’s. It provides better performance across the board, while also warming up faster and using less memory. The 3.3 release is also…
4755
Fly Kubernetes
Introducing Fly Kubernetes: If you want K8s on Fly.io, we built something for you.
4756
Python, C, Assembly – Faster Cosine Similarity
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.
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How many CPU cores can you use in parallel?
Figuring out how much parallelism your program can use is surprisingly tricky.
4758
Using Zig to Unit Test a C Application
Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design. Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit…
4759
Church vs. Curry Types
Static vs dynamic typing debates often flounder because the debators see from two different perspectives without knowing it. Learning to identify the two perspectives can calm the discussion. The tension between the two perspectives has led to Gradual Typing and other technologies.
4760
Interactive Code Cells
Like Jupyter notebooks, but for any language.
4761
Tracking Java native memory with JDK flight recorder
As regular readers of this blog will now, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of my favorite tools of the Java platform. This low-overhead event recording engine built into the JVM is invaluable for …
4762
So you want custom allocator support in your C library
Users of mature C libraries conventionally get to choose how memory is allocated — that is, when it cannot be avoided entirely . The C standard never laid down a convention — perhaps for the better — so each library re-invents an allocator interface. Not all are created equal, and most repeat a few fundamental…
4763
Evaluating new software forges
What options are there other than GitHub?
4764
A Forth Vocabulary for Iteration
blog dot information dash superhighway dot net2023112 points22 commentsProgramming Languages details
I recently wrote a small 16-bit Forth for 8086 PCs running DOS. I built the basic one-liner loop words that can trivially be built with j...
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Moving from relational data to events
Knock knock? Who’s there? It’s me, Oskar, the end is near, did you know that? Ah, you know it but don’t know how to proceed? Let’s talk about the end of the CRUD world…
4767
Advancements in machine learning for machine learning
Posted by Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, and Bryan Perozzi, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Re...
4768
New plans for self-hosted Zulip customers
Update: We have published a new blog post describing an additional Zulip plan for self-hosting without commercial support. Zulip is a 100% open-source team chat application designed for efficient communication. Zulip is available as a cloud service or a self-hosted solution. Organizations that self-host …
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Do large language models need all those layers?
Finding that 70% of attention heads and 20% of feed-forward networks can be excised with minimal effect on in-context learning suggests that large language models are undertrained.
4770
Database Fundamentals
The fundamental problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower