901
School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of doing (2021)
Learning is a consequence of doing
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
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Crossing the USA by Train
Today, I get to start a train trip I've always wanted to do: Going from New York to San Francisco!!
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Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
Now that we’re increasingly concerned about the dominance of ‘big tech’, Open Source is often mentioned as an alternative, especially since our governments are carrying out a Total Migration to Microsoft. This is the English version of this Dutch piece. In Dutch we say you can’t compare apples and pears, but that’s…
906
Moonshine, the new state of the art for speech to text
Can you imagine using a keyboard where it took a key press two seconds to show up on screen? That’s the typical latency for most voice interfaces, so it’s no wonder they’ve failed…
907
We shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size
We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. Using some new changes to the git client it went from 178GB to 5GB.
908
Debugging my wife's alarm clock
My wife's alarm clock has been acting up lately. Sporadic at first but then every day, it wouldn't blare in the morning at the set time. Instead, when it was supposed to go off it would... reset itself. The time would start flashing in that "I'm confused because the power went out" sort of way.
909
ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use
A few days ago, Anthropic released Claude Computer Use, which is a model + code that allows Claude to control a computer. It takes screenshots to make …
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Fundamentals of Radiance Cascades
A deep-dive into the fundamental concepts/ideas behind Radiance Cascades.
913
Goodhart’s law isn’t as useful as you might think (2023)
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
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Understanding Round Robin DNS
In which I try to understand how browsers and Cloudflare choose which server to use
915
Fruits (2020)
Fruits - Graph All The Things, a math blog by Martin Loncaric
916
Deep dive: the instability of op-amps
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
917
Do hard things carefully
Leaning in without falling over.
918
NixOS is not reproducible
Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the…
919
Adventures in algorithmic trading on the Runescape Grand Exchange
Runescape has been a game near and dear to my heart since I was a child. Though I do not actively play anymore, it still functions as an interesting programming project substrate. Most recently, I created a bot that automatically executes trades on the Grand Exchange in order to conduct market making via common…
920
We Can Terraform the American West
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…
921
Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
In mid-2022 I bought a new domain name.
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Detecting when LLMs are uncertain
A deep dive into a new reasoning technique called Entropix.
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926
SELinux bypasses
This post aims at giving an overview of what SELinux is, how it is implemented, and how to bypass it, from the point of view of Android kernel exploitation.
927
Care Doesn't Scale
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
928
A deep dive into Linux's new mseal syscall
If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is…
929
Category Theory Illustrated: Logic (2021)
Now let’s talk about one more seemingly unrelated topic just so we can “surprise” ourselves when we realize it’s category theory. By the way, in this chapter there will be another surprise in addition to that, so don’t fall asleep.
930
Unsafe Rust is harder than C
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written