The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,419 posts.
A pointer references a location in memory and dereferencing a pointer refers to the lookup of the value of the memory location the pointer references. The value of a pointer is a memory address. The C standard does not define the representation of a memory address. This is crucial since not every architecture makes…
Deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to the adversarial example phenomenon: all models tested so far can have their classifications dramatically altered by small image perturbations . The following predictions were for instance made by a state-of-the-art network trained to recognize celebrities :
There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are
DigiCert is electing to withdraw from the CA Security Council (CASC) as we believe CASC is moving in a direction that DigiCert does not support. Read more.
A couple weeks ago, Galois and Immunant launched c2rust. Since I wrote one of the best-known C-to-Rust translation tools (Corrode), and since I worked for Ga...
In Visual Studio 2017 release 15.8 Preview 3 we’re announcing support for Just My Code stepping for C++. In addition to previously supported callstack
The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018 I just had to start my blog post with that self quote ^^^ but I’m pretty confident it’ll hold true for me. I have owned several keyboards so…
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
On Software, life and everything in-between
How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
FINAL UPDATE (25-March-2022): Because of this article, we often keep getting asked if we still use GCP and if we would recommend it to…
Josef “Jeff” Sipek's Blahg
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories .
The belief that interests arrive fully formed and must simply be “found” can lead people to limit their pursuit of new fields and give up when they encounter challenges, according to a new Stanford study.
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
For an upcoming project, I need to extract level data from the classic 1985 video game Super Mario Bros (SMB) . More precisely, I want to extract the background imagery for each stage of the game, excluding HUD elements and moving sprites, etc.
We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts,...
In this post I’ll discuss how a landmark piece of privacy research was widely misinterpreted, how this misinterpretation deterred the development of privacy technologies rather than spurring it, how a recent paper set the record straight, and what we can learn from all this. The research in question is about browser…
Amazon Apps & Services Developer Portal
Five years ago I realized that I remembered almost nothing about most books that I read. I was reading all kinds of non-fiction - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-sociology, you name it - and felt like quite the polymath auto-didact. But one day, after I had finished blathering at a friend about how much I had…
Crystal 0.25.1 has been released!
Bill Gates was as aware as everyone else of the abundant deficiencies of his own company’s hastily procured operating system for the IBM PC. So, in September of 1981, before the PC had even shipped and just a handful of months after VisiCorp had started their own similar project , he initiated work at Microsoft on a…
Search DuckDuckGo for “polygraph” and you’ll find AntiPolygraph.org, which hosts more documentation on polygraphs than any other site on the Internet, in the top 10 results. The same is true for searches on “polygraph” with Microsoft’s Bing search engine (in the United States), with Russia’s Yandex search engine, and…
Most of us last saw calculus in school, but derivatives are a critical part of machine learning, particularly deep neural networks, which are trained by optimizing a loss function. This article is an attempt to explain all the matrix calculus you need in order to understand the training of deep neural networks. We…
