1981
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,838 posts.
1982
Killing a process and all of its descendants
Killing processes in a Unix-like system can be trickier than expected. Last week I was debugging an odd issue related to job stopping on Semaphore. More specifically, an issue related to the killing of a running process in a job.
1983
Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
1984
Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?
I’m sure many of you either have an Alexa-powered device in your house, or at least have played around with one somewhere. So it won’t be surprising to you that Amazon has been partnering with home…
1985
1986
SpaCy PyTorch Transformers
Huge transformer models like BERT, GPT-2 and XLNet have set a new standard for accuracy on almost every NLP leaderboard. You can now use these models in spaCy, via a new interface library we've developed that connects spaCy to Hugging Face's awesome implementations.
1987
1988
Network Effects That Don’t Look Like Network Effects
Many of the most consequential projects of the internet era — from Wikipedia to Facebook and bitcoin — have all been predicated on network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. As a result, we’ve become really good at analyzing and measuring network effects. Whether it’s…
1989
Producing an Ebook, Step by Step
A detailed step-by-step description of the complete process of producing an ebook for Standard Ebooks, start to finish.
1990
Cartoons in Tektronix Schematics
Explore Tektronix schematic cartoons with vintageTEK. Discover hidden humorous drawings in manuals and schematics from classic Tektronix gear.
1991
1992
Typed Properties in PHP 7.4
PHP 7.4 adds typed properties to classes
1993
Advances in Conversational AI
Facebook AI has made scientific progress in improving nuanced conversational skills, including consistency, specificity, and empathy.
1994
Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
1995
Knuth on Huang's Sensitivity Proof: “I've got the proof down to one page” [pdf]
The Sensitivity Conjecture, which I blogged about here, says that, for every Boolean function f:{0,1}n→{0,1}, the sensitivity of f—that is, the maximum, over all 2n input strings x∈{0,1}n, of…
1996
Time, Randomness, and a $100k Prize to Forever Change Blockchain
Announcing an open source hardware competition to change how blocks (as in blockchain) are produced using far less energy. And on the way, finding a solution to move from proof of work to proof of stake.
1997
Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers
It is a regular occurrence to hear about open source developers selling their browser extensions, only for their users to be exploited later on by the new owners. Purchase offers for browser extensions usually range between $0.1 and $0.3 per user, depending on factors such as the geographical distribution of users…
1998
PartiQL: One query language for all your data
Data is being gathered and created at rates unprecedented in history. Much of this data is intended to drive business outcomes but, according to the Harvard Business Review, “…on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions…” The root of the problem is that data is…
1999
2000
Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp?
This article points out that Facebook’s planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook’s vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be…
2001
John Carmack on Parallel Implementations (2018)
ps aux | more
2002
Dwindling CPAN Releases
This couple of months I’ve been casually looking at daily CPAN uploads, because I entered the Once-a-day-releases game. I notice that the uploads are getting scarcer and scarcer. So today I d…
2003
Programming Algorithms: A Crash Course in Lisp
The introductory post for this book, unexpectedly, received quite a lot of attention, which is nice since it prompted some questions, and on...
2004
Composing better emails
Lazarus Lazaridis’ personal blog with posts mostly related to programming and opensource. And cats.
2005
2006
2007
LightSail 2 Spacecraft Successfully Demonstrates Flight by Light
In the past 4 days, the spacecraft has raised its orbital high point, or apogee, by about 2 kilometers.
2008
A Brief Guide to a Few Algebraic Structures
Occasional writings about Haskell.
2009
Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
A detailed explanation of why I keep saying that advertising is a cancer on modern society.
2010
Why Generics?
Why should we add generics to Go, and what might they look like?