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My finetuned models beat OpenAI's GPT-4
Finetunes of Mistral, Llama3 and Solar LLMs are more accurate for my test data than OpenAI’s models.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,874 posts.
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Cities need more trees
A case for planting more trees in urban areas.
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Programmers should never trust anyone, not even themselves
Programmers should be paranoid.
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A better merge workflow with Jujutsu
A merge workflow for activating multiple branches simultaneously using Jujutsu, an alternative VCS to Git.
14706
Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews
Most people want to work for your company for money, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
14707
Four lines of code it was four lines of code
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
14708
Integrated assembler improvements in LLVM 19
Within the LLVM project, MC is a library responsible for handling assembly, disassembly, and object file formats. Intro to the LLVM MC Project, which was written back in 2010, remains a good source to understand the high-level structures. In the latest release cycle, substantial effort has been dedicated to refining…
14709
Conway's Game of Life for curved surfaces (2012)
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular and iconic cellular automata. It is so famous that googling it loads up a working simulation right in your browser! The rules for the Game o…
14710
A Model of a Mind
This article explains a simple model of how minds might work. I’m motivated by the success of AI-based language models to look at the future of digital minds. I’ll present a conceptual data-flow architecture that can account for several key features of minds: the ability to initiate actions (agency), learning…
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Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)
The GoodWatch is my replacement circuit board for Casio’s modern calculator watches, adding support for 70cm and 33cm amateur bands while retaining three years of battery life and most of the watch’s features. It uses the CC430F6147 chip from Texas Instruments, and the watchband forms an untuned random wire antenna…
14712
Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…
14713
Unification in Elixir
Pattern matching is a pervasive and powerful tool in Elixir. This isn't too surprising if you know a little about the history of Elixir's parent language, Erlang. Erlang was originally inspired by and written in Prolog, a logic programming language where pattern matching has first-class support. In
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A simplified Python simulation of diffusion
Understanding the real world is not always easy. A Python simulation can help. And let's find ways of making it efficient, too.
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The weirdest QNX bug I've encountered (2021)
I am responsible for the reliability of the firmware updates on our devices and this work never gets boring. The thing about firmware updates is that by definition, every bug is caused by the updater because before installing the affected version, the bug was not present. You could say that updates are the cause and…
14718
An unexpected journey into Microsoft Defender's signature World
Microsoft Defender is the endpoint security solution preinstalled on every Windows machine since Windows 7. It's a fairly complex piece of software, addressing both EDR and EPP use cases. As such, Microsoft markets two different products. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud based endpoint security solution that…
14719
Weekend projects: getting silly with C
C is beautiful yet full of horrors. Here's to uncovering its hidden depths.
14720
The physics of airplane flight
A common misconception about wings is that they need to have the classic airfoil shape to work. In reality, just about any surface can create lift and function as a wing.
14721
Inside a $1 radar motion sensor
I recently got some cheap microwave motion sensors, mostly because I was wondering how China managed to make a radar for under a dollar:
14722
Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)
I wanted to add an internal USB port to my ThinkPad X1 Nano which should have been a fairly easy thing to do, but it wasn't.
14723
Trilobites killed by volcanic ash
Some of the most perfectly preserved trilobite fossils ever found have revealed details of the extinct arthropod unknown until now.
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AirPods fast connect security vulnerability
tldr: There's a security vulnerability (CVE-2024-27867) in the firmware of Apple AirPods. Anyone who knows the Bluetooth MAC address (which is somewhat public) can connect to your AirPods and listen to the microphone or play music. Even while the AirPods are connected to your phone (although music would stop playing…
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The super effectiveness of Pokémon embeddings using only raw JSON and images
Embeddings encourage engineers to go full YOLO because it’s actually rewarding to do so!
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Anatomy of a cryptocurrency scam
You receive a message. Now either you will be victim or not. Your knowledge, attention and moral compass will decide where you will end up.
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The economics of writing technical books
Yes, you can make money writing books. But never do it for that.
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Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws
Dynamic languages are safe from memory corruptions bugs, right?
14730
A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago
I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me. If you (or your team) are shooting…