The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,220 posts.
President Joe Biden has announced that Ingrid Daubechies , James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics , will receive the National Medal of Science in 2025. She is being honored for her pioneering work on signal processing.
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
Update 2024-01-12 : Ken Shirriff has an an excellent blog post on why “cargo cult” is a poor term of art.
I have been using FreeBSD on the desktops/laptops since about 20 years now and I have described all that I configured in the FreeBSD Desktop series. About 1 year ago I shared a video on YouTube and…
You can use CSS to add some simple functionality to HTML <dialog> elements!
The difference between misinformation and disinformation is the difference between ignorance and malice. Trolling is somewhat different, incorporating an element of provocation and narcissism. But what the hell is this?
Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.
I made something that I think is pretty neat, and I want to tell you about it. This is a little hot air balloon made out of alternating layers of brass and bronze that stack together with these angled facets: It’s 3D printed, sort of, but it really is solid metal – it’s not a metallic filament. It’s made by “lost wax…
Fine-tune Microsoft's new Phi-4 model with Unsloth! We've also found & fixed 4 bugs in the model.
The Attic is a running catalog of Olup's side projects, sketches, and weekend rabbit holes.
They won't be able to find bugs in your code if they can't figure out how it works.
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
By Laurence Boone, Boris Cournède, OECD Economics Department; and Marissa Plouin, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Following a period when homele…
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
Yesterday, I was browsing Reddit. Midway through my feed, I stumbled upon a video from a German TV show, where a 9-year-old girl demonstrated her ability to…
A number of our customers have recently been asking whether we support OpenTelemetry, the observability framework and toolkit.
Stephen Wolfram discusses understanding proofs discovered using automated theorem proving. Based on Wolfram’s proof of the simplest axioms of logic of Boolean algebra.
The Internet is decentralized by design. It came into being not at once, but in parts. New protocols were added on top of previous ones, but one crucial protocol is still missing.
Random tech notes
There are certain kinds of experiences that most human beings know very little about because a) they are rare, b) they can only be felt from the "inside", i.e., by the people who have them, and c) not all of those people choose to, or are good at, writing
News post: Gleam v1.7.0 released
There's a new web search in town! I spent the start of 2024 kicking the tires on Kagi's paid search and their Orion web browser.
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
Large language models like ChatGPT & Claude have become ubiquitous in today’s world. I visited a friend for the New years eve and was impressed by how ChatGPT was being extensively used within the family. The friend’s little kid is going to grow up in a world, where turning to large language models (LLM) for quick…
Why nextest runs each test in its own process: a game-theoretic view.
