19921
Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,910 posts.
19922
A conversation with a newspaper owner raided by cops
Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief prior to the raids on his office and home.
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Fedora Asahi Remix first impressions
My personal website and blog
19926
The Carrot Problem
It's not the crime, it's the coverup.
19927
Notes on running a single-person Mastodon server
Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server
19928
20 Years of Vim
Create and share beautiful and engaging annotated charts2023212 points76 commentsTools & Productivity details
The hard work from maintainers turned Vim into a completely new editor, while still maintaining its spirit.
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19930
What is gained and lost with 63-bit integers? (2014)
Almost every programming language uses 64-bit integers on typical modern Intel machines. OCaml uses a special 63-bit representation. How does it affect OCaml?
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Our fight is far from over
Four months after the disappointing decision on summary judgment in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a number of papers were filed today in the district court, and then the judge is expected to make his final judgment. We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but…
19934
Web Environment Integrity has no standing at W3C; understanding new W3C work
This article addresses that Web Environment Integrity is not being worked on at W3C, and proceeds to explaining how work is brought to W3C and the processes that foster the development of Web standards and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web.
19935
Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
After successful recommissioning in autumn 2022, the Greifswald nuclear fusion experiment has surpassed an important target.
19936
Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
When complexity leaps are on the table, there’s usually also an opportunity to squeeze some extra juice out of the system you have. By tweaking the workload, tuning performance, or supplement…
19937
Reading Ancient Scrolls
This is an elaboration of my submission for the letter detection prize as part of the Vesuvius Challenge in June. It gets technical and esoteric but the first few paragraphs are of general interest…
19938
Fine-Tuning Llama-2: A Comprehensive Case Study for Tailoring Custom Models
We examine the Llama-2 models under 3 real-world use cases and show that fine-tuning yields significant accuracy improvements.
19939
ML is useful for many things, but not for predicting scientific replicability
How the veneer of AI is used to legitimize awful ideas
19940
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
19941
What HashiCorp’s license change means for our customers
On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp changed licensing for all its products, including Terraform. See what does it mean and how to mitigate its impact.
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Fastest branchless binary search
Fastest general and simple binary search C++ implementation
19944
There is no hard takeoff
Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too.
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Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction
[On-line document since 2007, last updated in September 2026] [Translations: 中文 , Español , lietuvių kalba ]
19947
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)
You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. Robin Williams
19948
Sorting in Emacs
In this article, we will perform a series of hands-on experiments that demonstrate the various Emacs commands that can be used to sort text in different ways. There is sufficient documentation available for these commands in the Emacs and Elisp manuals. In this article, however, we will take a look at some concrete…
19949
Browsers barely care what HTTP status code your web pages are served with
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
19950
How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIa: Starting Down the Path of Honors
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023109 points48 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the third of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries. Last time we discussed Rome&…