The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,899 posts.
Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap. Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances…
Are you kidding? Edward Barbeau is now a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Toronto. Over the years he has been working to increase the interest in mathematics in general, and e…
Random thoughts, articles and projects by a chronic overengineer.
Progress report for the Spider-Man decompilation project
It is with great sadness that the Simons Foundation announces the death of its co-founder and chair emeritus, James Harris Simons, on May 10, 2024, at the age of 86, in New York City. Jim (as he…
I am a minimalist, and I tend to always keep it as small as I can, so I try to use all I have in base (if it fits), plus of course some other tools needed.
Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting at the theory of consensus numbers and moving onto atomic operations and then synchronization primitives and lock-free data structures, all from first principles. With…
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
A story of finding, understanding, and fixing a memory leak in our Rails app. With graphs and code!
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
Over the last number of years, our planet has become encircled by Starlink, OneWeb, and other “megaconstellation” satellites.
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…
Posted by Long Zhao, Senior Research Scientist, and Ting Liu, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Research An astounding number of videos are av...
This document presents new time-based UUID formats which are suited for use as a database key. A common case for modern applications is to create a unique identifier for use as a primary key in a database table. This identifier usually implements an embedded timestamp that is sortable using the monotonic creation time…
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
This was several years back. Keep in mind that early in my career, my father had told me that doing a good job often meant doing what needed to be done in spite of your boss. And by that he meant that you can either make your boss successful and happy or you can run every decision by your boss. In which case no one is…
In this post I want to create a single file C file program to open a windows inside Linux without using xlib or any similar libraries. The idea is to explore X11 protocol and see how it is used to interact with X server to create windows.
In this ever changing and evolving world of user generated versus AI generated content, the recent announcement of Stack Overflow partnering with OpenAI recently has been met with some backlash by …
Posted by Christian Plagemann, Director, and Katya Cox, Product Manager, Google Research Learning a language can open up new opportunities in a per...
TL;DR: LLMs have been traditionally regarded as sequential decoders, decoding one token after another. In this blog, we show pretrained LLMs can be easily taught to operate as efficient parallel decoders. We introduce Consistency Large Language Models (CLLMs), a new family of parallel decoders capable of reducing…
How we designed xkcd's massive rube goldberg machine game in 3 weeks.
Our new AI model AlphaFold 3 can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy.
Anyone who still has a working Spectrum ZX will then be able to test the game.
I've been involved in the Rust project in some form or another since 2016, and it's a language I'm very comfortable using. Many Rust programmers could say the same . But, if we take a step back and are honest with ourselves, we'd admit that the road to getting to that level of comfort was difficult.
Many years ago, Kragen complained about the implementation and performance of Java regexes , and suggested that an implementation that emitted JVM bytecode could perform better. It's been a minute, but I'm happy to report that complaining on the Internet has served its purpose.
